State Department under "siege": End of an era?

For an ambitious American diplomat, it's a good time to look for a new position - at least on paper.

As of late June, more than half of the United States' ambassadorial posts were vacant, including prestigious positions from Germany to Saudi Arabia. For diplomats looking to specialize in Africa, there is a unique opportunity: nearly 80 percent of US embassies on the continent are without ambassadors.

Inside the US State Department, however, the career prospects for diplomats are not so promising. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he has clearly shown his disdain for what he calls “a rather foolish foreign policy establishment.”

As the official and sometimes arrogant executor of America's position in the world, the State Department is accustomed to an extraordinary prestige abroad. Since the end of the Cold War, American ambassadors and envoys have often dominated host countries with an authority reminiscent of imperial regents.

However, eighteen months into Trump's second term, the State Department has not only been sidelined, but appears to be under siege.

Breaking with a 60-year practice, Trump bypassed the Foreign Service officers who traditionally run at least two-thirds of embassies. Of the 101 nominees for ambassadorial posts during his second term, only nine were career diplomats.

All of this is happening while drastic cuts are being made to the State Department's budget, whose staff has been reduced by more than 3.000 people, or over 20 percent, since Trump's return to power.

Administration officials portray the changes as overdue reform of a bureaucratic and out-of-touch part of government. The State Department, they argue, has become an obstacle, losing sight of its purpose: helping to achieve America's national security goals.

Diplomats, however, warn of the gross politicization and purge of experts being carried out in the spirit of an "America First" culture that despises regional knowledge and experience.

Meanwhile, traditional American allies lament the loss of the State Department's stabilizing voice in everyday global diplomacy, while deals struck by relatively inexperienced negotiators fail to hold up.

"We are looking at the most damaging crisis in the 102-year history of the Foreign Service," said Nick Burns, who served in the US Foreign Service for 31 years, most recently as ambassador to China before Trump took office again last year.

The decline of American power?

State Department veterans are dismayed. Their concern is not just about the loss of jobs and reputation, but also about what they see as the weakening of American authority due to the loss of institutional knowledge and a departure from the path of diplomacy.

“Things are pretty bad,” says Bill Burns, who spent 32 years in the US foreign service, including as ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of state, before becoming CIA director under President Joseph Biden.

Burns argues that Trump's policies are causing even greater damage to the State Department than the Joseph McCarthy era of the 1950s, when the then-senator's anti-communist campaign led to a loss of expertise on China issues.

“It was related to a relatively specific set of issues and it cost the United States a significant amount of money for the next fifteen years or so, until Nixon and Kissinger’s breakthrough with China. But this is across the board. It’s not just one region or one type of expertise,” he points out.

The former CIA chief highlights not only what he describes as administrative “retaliation” against the State Department and career officials, but also “an almost worse attitude – the underestimation of professional diplomacy.”

Trump has relied on his close aides to broker deals, such as last month's memorandum of understanding with Iran, which has now virtually collapsed as the two countries trade blows. Many critics blame the fragility of the deal, as well as the terms they say favored Tehran, on Trump's decision to bypass experts.

“You need that kind of apolitical career experience to be able to compete with, in this case, Iranian negotiators, who, in my personal experience, are very well-versed in these issues,” adds Burns, who has participated in several negotiations with Iran himself. “The same is true if we ever get to serious negotiations on Russia and Ukraine,” he added.

Jel Lempert, a 27-year veteran of the State Department who was removed by Trump from his post as ambassador to Jordan on the first day of his second term, is more direct.

"We were outplayed. The Iranians are experienced negotiators and brought with them teams of experts who knew these issues in detail. The United States did not have that, so we found ourselves unilaterally at a disadvantage," she says.

"Thoughtful and reasonable"

In the spirit of the Trump administration’s broader fight against what it calls the “deep state,” officials are presenting the changes at the State Department as “thoughtful and reasonably planned” measures to align it with its “America First” policy. They will, an administration spokesman says, allow the department to “act with a speed that is appropriate for the modern moment.”

“What is the function of the State Department?” asks a senior Trump administration official. “He likes to think that it is the center of foreign policy. That is not true. Its job is to represent the president’s foreign policy, not to create it,” he says.

When Marco Rubio was appointed Secretary of State at the start of Trump's second term, he came to the department and, according to the official, said, "This isn't working."

Inside the department, they acknowledge that State has indeed demanded a rethink. One veteran says that not enough has been done in recent years to address issues such as overlapping jurisdictions. Another says the organization has sometimes been passive-aggressive toward its political superiors.

But diplomats fear that the reforms are just a pretext for completely downgrading the institution. They also worry that the speed of change, as demonstrated by last year's abrupt closure of USAID, the development agency founded by John F. Kennedy, can sometimes have disastrous consequences.

“There is some truth to the argument that the State Department has long been in need of consolidation and modernization. But it seems like everything was done very quickly, without much analysis of the consequences for American diplomacy,” says Jacob Shapiro, the John Foster Dulles Professor of International Affairs at Princeton University.

Administration allies point to the start of the Cold War about eight decades ago as the last time the department underwent such dramatic changes. What is clear is that the roots of the current overhaul date back to Trump's first term, when he was furious at the department's reluctance to follow his demands.

James Carafano of the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation says that Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State in the second half of Trump's first term, followed the model of most of his predecessors, regardless of whether they were Republicans or Democrats - "I did my thing and let the department do its thing."

“Pompeo did what the president wanted, but he didn't interfere in the internal affairs of the department. His model was: 'please the president and please the institution.' In his second term, Trump wanted more alignment with his vision. It's about exercising power from the top down and creating the State Department he wants,” Carafano adds.

In his second term, Trump clearly demonstrated the hierarchy of his foreign policy by choosing mediators for global crises: business friends and donors, such as Steve Witkoff and Tom Barrack, as well as people close to the Trump family, such as Jared Kushner, his son-in-law.

For generations, presidents have appointed close associates as special envoys, as well as allies and donors to the most prestigious ambassadorial positions, such as in London and Paris, some of whom have proven to be successful diplomats.

But previous presidents have generally struck a balance between political patronage and the hiring of experienced diplomats. The very purpose of the Foreign Service, when it was founded in May 1924, was, in the words of Nick Burns, to replace the 19th-century “system of political patronage and privilege-sharing” with real expertise.

A return to such an approach, he argues, weakens America's insight into the world and its ability to govern it.

"Many of our most experienced diplomats have been dismissed without any process. Now there are no career diplomats in the decision-making rooms... It's an own goal," adds Burns.

The Trump administration dismisses much of the criticism as out of touch with the modern world. They argue that there is less need for reports sent to Washington about the atmosphere and local politics than in previous decades, adding that in the era of social media, 24-hour news cycles, and direct communication between world leaders, observations from US embassies on the ground are less necessary.

“The role of the embassy is to be a logistics center,” says a senior administration official.

In such an atmosphere, American diplomats are now regularly ignored, and not only by the administration.

“I see career civil servants I talk to sitting at their desks reading newspapers or running around in circles writing documents that get nowhere,” says a former senior US diplomat.

Diplomats representing American allies in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia acknowledge that they have moved away from the traditional nurturing of relationships with State Department counterparts and toward Trump's inner circle and his envoys.

The change is not only a consequence of where real influence now lies, but also the fact that American diplomats may not have much more insight into Trump's foreign policy than their foreign counterparts.

They are also forced into self-censorship.

Career diplomats still meet with foreign officials, but they are “very cautious” about what they say, says a former senior US diplomat.

"Deputy heads of mission and ambassadors generally don't send actual reports anymore. They're very careful about what they send back to Washington," he adds.

Rubio, who in addition to serving as Secretary of State and Trump's national security adviser, spends much more time in the White House, where, according to officials, decisions are made, than at the department's headquarters in Foggy Bottom.

Such developments further deepen the impression within and outside the department that it is surrounded, if not pushed onto the defensive.

The weakening of the department is reminiscent of a medieval siege, according to a former senior diplomat:

"First they fired cannonballs at the city... and then they salted the fields," he says.

Culture change

If there's one thing that both veteran diplomats and MAGA activists agree on, it's that the State Department is undergoing a comprehensive culture shift.

Trump's team has moved quickly to impose its vision of "America First" on an institution it sees as liberal, hostile, and prone to leaking information to the media. There is a spirit of both revenge and revolution in the air.

"There were a lot of people who thought they were making policy and who were just arguing and opposing decisions. It was very difficult to implement anything. You would end up with some lukewarm memorandum," says a senior administration official.

Career diplomats respond that they have traditionally considered themselves apolitical civil servants and warn of an atmosphere of fear, in which people are "looking over their shoulders" and worried about whether their loyalty is being tested according to the criteria of the MAGA ideology.

Nick Burns rejects claims by Trump allies that the department has effectively become a liberal gated community of like-minded people.

“Throughout my decades at the State Department, we have tried to create an environment where people can speak up... and speak out when they think a policy is wrong. Our position has been: if you create that environment, then when a decision is made, welcome it and move on,” he says.

Bill Burns points to a new focus at the State Department on “loyalty” or “total devotion.” He links this to checking “what people’s political leanings might be… from the very process of entering the service all the way through promotions and evaluations.”

"I think it's deeply unhealthy. For all its flaws, in my experience at the State Department, people have generally left their political beliefs at the door. If you start to take that out of people, you end up looking like many authoritarian systems that intimidate professional civil servants and end up making bad decisions," he believes.

During the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, the succession of Republican and Democratic secretaries of state generally went smoothly, partly because both parties usually shared a similar view of America's role in the world.

But the takeover of the Republican Party by its “America First” wing changed everything.

The main point of internal discussions about this change is the Ben Franklin Fellowship, an organization of conservative current and former foreign service officers, founded two years ago with the aim of promoting conservative ideas, personnel and new members.

Matt Boyce, one of the three founders, joined the State Department in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president.

Over the past three decades, he says, the department has “gone further and further to the left. It started under Bill Clinton, and then it went at an accelerated pace during the Biden administration.”

As examples of liberal bias, he cites the greater focus of the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations on diversity, equality, and inclusion programs, as well as the increase in the number of USAID programs, which he claims “did not advance the national interest.”

"There were a lot of good things happening in the department, but it was moving to the left in terms of atmosphere and policies. If you're a liberal, you don't notice it or you think it's completely normal. They also think that reforms just require more money, more employees and more programs... If you're in the half of America that isn't progressive or liberal, you say, 'Wait a minute, this is going in the wrong direction,'" he says.

Boyce insists that BFF is a broad conservative network, not an organization that belongs exclusively to the MAGA movement.

“There’s a mix of people there, from Reaganites to libertarians to Trump’s America First supporters to people who supported John McCain,” he says, referring to the former Republican presidential candidate who advocated interventionist policies.

"Their common denominator is that they are not liberals," he points out.

He adds that many members lost their jobs during the cuts.

Career diplomats, however, speak with concern about the BFF as the center of a new culture in the department that monitors employees' political views.

Some ambassadors are being asked their opinion on the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, according to a former senior US diplomat.

“There’s a clear sense that there are political watchdogs around people,” says Lempert, a former ambassador to Jordan under Biden. “There’s an unprecedented level of fear, where people are afraid that if they voice criticism or an alternative approach to politics, it could be interpreted as disloyalty and they could lose their jobs,” she adds.

Boyce doesn't have much sympathy for the diplomats' stories about the cold political winds that have begun to blow.

“Some foreign service officers defend their heritage, while others baselessly claim they have been discriminated against. It is somewhat ironic when people who have been at the top for decades suddenly start claiming they have been discriminated against. BFF strongly supports the administration as it tries to put the country back where it belongs,” he says.

No return

How hard should Trump's opponents try to restore the State Department to what it once was? That will be one of the big questions Democrats will face if they win the presidency again in 2028.

Some foreign policy experts close to the Democratic Party accept that in today's America it would be politically unacceptable to advocate a return to the role of global hegemon that the country had before Trump.

They believe that the challenge is to reinvent American diplomacy.

For example, they argue that, given that America's partial withdrawal from the world seems irreversible, it is increasingly difficult to justify the costs of an entire embassy system, even at a time when China is trying hard to curry favor with countries in the global south.

One strategist even argues that the Democratic administration should use Trump's "very poorly motivated" reforms to reinvent the department and adapt it to the needs of a world where leaders routinely communicate with each other via apps like WhatsApp.

Veteran diplomats agree that a tipping point has been reached. Bill Burns, the former director of the CIA, believes that the old State Department may never return.

"While there was an assumption during Trump's first term that, with a different administration and a different worldview, much of the damage could be rebuilt and repaired within a four-year cycle, this is now more of a generational challenge," he says.

Moreover, he adds, it would be a mistake to try to restore the old model.

“The only big mistake people could make, if a different administration came in 2029, is to think that this is just a matter of turning back the clock and going back to the way things used to work,” he concluded.

Translated by: S. Strugar