"It can't be business as usual when the entire [upper] floor of the State Department is missing,"

[riversedge]

Diplomacy used to one of best traits, now it almost gone.

Link to tweet

The guilty secret of every diplomat in Washington DC

By Paul Danahar
BBC Washington Bureau Chief

07 July 2017


President Donald J. Trump (C) smiles towards Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (2-R, back to camera) while Chinese President Xi Jinping (L) takes his seat
Image caption "Four minutes with him is worth hours of meeting with anybody else," one head of state said

It's tough being a diplomat when nobody talks to you. It's even worse when they aren't talking to you because they don't think you matter anymore.

When he was just a candidate, Donald Trump declared in his first major speech on the issue that "our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster". His solution was to replace it with a slogan: America First. What he hasn't replaced, now that he is president, are the people normally tasked with projecting America's power around the world.

"It can't be business as usual when the entire [upper] floor of the State Department is missing," one ambassador said.

Ambassadors in Washington are clueless these days, or rather clues are all they have, because, as this one was explaining to me, the usual avenues of diplomacy in the US capital have broken down. The same words were spoken by several ambassadors from across the globe that I've spoken to in DC recently.
State department
Image caption There are dozens of senior positions lying vacant at the Department of State

The "missing people" are the undersecretaries and assistant secretaries of state with whom all the diplomats in the US capital normally conduct their day-to-day operational business. .........................

[jehop61]

1. He hates State

Bad Hillary was head of it, wasn't she?

[underpants]

2. The right has hated State going back to McCarthy