Vice President Joe Biden didn’t get the customary airport tarmac welcome by the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala when he arrived in the Central American nation on June 20 for crisis meetings on the surge of illegal immigrant children into the United States.
Four months earlier, Ambassador Arnold Chacon left Guatemala for a new assignment in Washington. No replacement had been named when Biden arrived.
So Charisse Phillips, the embassy’s charge d’affaires, met Biden, but she couldn’t tell him much, having herself only arrived in Guatemala City a month earlier from her previous post in Frankfurt, Germany.
Guatemala is vital to U.S. efforts to fix the border crisis because it is home to some 5,000 Guatemalan “coyotes” who bring most of the unaccompanied children north through Mexico to the United States.
Guatemala’s isn’t unique in having no ambassador from the United States. Fifty-one U.S. embassies, nearly one-third of the total, either have no ambassador or must make do with an interim envoy and no confirmed replacement, according to the American Foreign Service Association.
As President Obama confronts multiplying problems around the globe, the lack of senior diplomatic officials in many of the hottest spots can only make those crises more difficult to deal with.
During the past year, there were no U.S. ambassadors to Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, India, Venezuela, Argentina and South Korea.
Eric Farnsworth, a former special envoy for President Clinton, said such extended diplomatic vacancies create a dangerous impression that U.S. leaders are preoccupied elsewhere. “You know when countries don’t have a U.S. ambassador in place, the perception is frequently that the United States isn’t paying a whole lot of attention to that particular country, whether it’s Guatemala or El Salvador or China,” said Farnsworth, who is vice president of the Council of the Americas.
Similarly, Roger Noriega, President George W. Bush’s ambassador to the Organization of American States, said Chacon’s prolonged absence during the immigration crisis sent a clear message to Guatemala. “Speaking so clearly in recent months about Central American countries having to pull their weight and dealing with this migration crisis and to undertake new activities to bring it under control, it says something to the Guatemalans that Washington can’t approve an envoy,” Noriega said.
Some of the current vacancies were caused by legislative “holds” senators placed on nominees, sometimes for purely political reasons.
Many of the vacancies are, however, self-inflicted wounds for Obama. Administration officials knew, for example, in the summer of 2013 that Chacon was headed for promotion to director general of the U.S. Foreign Service. Chacon was nominated for the Foreign Service post Oct. 4, 2013, and he departed Guatemala in February this year. But it wasn’t until June that Obama nominated career Foreign Service Officer Todd Robinson to replace him in Guatemala. That nomination is pending in the Senate. “That seems like an extraordinary amount of time before they nominated a career ambassador,” Noriega said. “It’s inexplicable to me why it took so long.”
The same problem is unfolding in India, where U.S. Ambassador Nancy Powell announced her resignation in March. She left in May, just as newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed office.
India is geographically vital to the United States as it shares borders with Pakistan and China, both of which have important and troublesome relations with Washington. Obama has yet to nominate Powell’s successor. “And so now we have a new government that’s looking for a new relationship with the United States and we don’t have a permanent, confirmed ambassador in place,” said Matthew Asada, vice president of the American Foreign Service Association. In South Korea, U.S. Ambassador Sung Kim is returning to Washington to serve as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. His replacement in Seoul, Mark Lippert, awaits Senate confirmation.
There was no U.S. ambassador in Moscow when Russia began moving into the Crimea in February, and there still isn’t one.
The Middle East has the weakest U.S. ambassadorial presence. When the Egyptian military toppled the democratically-elected government of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, there was no ambassador in Cairo. Ambassador to Iraq Robert Stephen Beecroft was nominated for the Cairo post on May 8. David Andrew Weinberg, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, decried the long ambassadorial absence from Cairo.
“The United States did not have an ambassador in Egypt after August of last year until last month,” he said. “That’s an enormous gap of time, almost the entire time in which Egypt had an interim government after Morsi.”
Another major Middle East country without a U.S. ambassador is Turkey, which borders Syria, Iraq and Iran. The American Jewish Committee recently called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “arguably the most virulent anti-Israel leader in the world.”
U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Joseph W. Westphal arrived in Riyadh on March 27, one day before Obama began an important state visit there. The Senate moved Westphal’s nomination to the front of the line to confirm him before Obama’s trip. “He had no time in which to build relationships there or to set the ground for the president’s trip, and there was no one there for five months during which [the] U.S.-Saudi relationship had one of its biggest meltdowns in modern history,” Weinberg said.
