Insiders challenge media's spin of low State Department morale

“There are a lot of people who love engagement with the North Koreans, they love diplomacy. I think that there are a lot of people who love the idea that the key thing is that we don’t want to do war, we want to do diplomacy. I’ve never seen diplomacy at the forefront and it’s really exciting,” he said in an interview.

What’s more, with the president making good on his promises to withdraw troops from hot spots, Grenell said that it is a good time for diplomacy.

“It drives me crazy when the president says that we are going to bring our troops home and immediately the media is like, ‘We are withdrawing from the world.’ I’m like, ‘No, actually we have a whole other department called the State Department. When DoD withdraws that means we the diplomats get to go in,” he said.

Amid the Ukraine-focused impeachment process with top diplomats testifying against the president; budget cuts; and after three years of White House-driven foreign policy, there has been a growing wave of reports in the media of low morale among diplomats.

Some have dubbed morale at an “all-time” low. Washington reporters have played it up.

Just today, for example, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell rejected Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s claim that the storyline about low morale is wrong. She tweeted, “@SecPompeo calls reports of low morale @StateDept ‘Washington insider-y stuff a long history of the press reporting about unhappiness at the State Department, especially, frankly, in Republican administrations.’ No, not under Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Jim Baker, George Shultz.”

But diplomats and experts said that morale has rarely been high inside the department, one of the nation’s largest bureaucracies that is regularly the subject of reform calls.

Morale at the State Department is a common story in the media, and the all-time low description has been used several times including during the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Carter-era Iran hostage crisis, the Clinton-era troubles in Bosnia, and the murders of diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, during the Obama administration.

A 2007 report from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for Strategic and International Studies detailed massive problems at State during the Clinton administration. “This has been reflected by alarming rates of resignations from the Foreign Service. Resignations by foreign service generalists have doubled between 1994 and 2000, while resignations by foreign service specialists have quadrupled in that time frame,” according to the report.

Organizational problems and poor communication have long plagued State and many of those problems remain today.

Brett Schaefer, an expert at the Heritage Foundation, said that Trump’s lack of foreign policy background and his initial pick of Rex Tillerson as secretary of state were initially a problem.

But that is changing.

“Many Washington foreign policy professionals just could not see themselves working for [Trump] and I think that’s changed over time. I think that there has been a broader realization that if you want to help this administration succeed and to advance conservative policies and interests you really have to be inside to provide the benefit of your experience,” Schaefer said.

And, he added, “There has been no Halcion point in recent memory where State Department morale has been one of rainbows and unicorns.”