The Trump administration has announced a series of sweeping changes to the Foreign Service. These are much-needed and past due. They promise to ensure that our nation’s top diplomats will be better prepared to advocate for America’s national interests abroad.
On April 1, the State Department announced “modernization reforms” to one of the country’s oldest and most storied agencies. Long regarded as one of America’s premier institutions, the department set that standard early, beginning with George Washington’s appointment of Thomas Jefferson as the first secretary of state. Many of Jefferson’s immediate successors went on to glittering careers in diplomacy and statecraft. James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, William Seward, and John Hay, among others, advanced American prosperity and security and set the United States on the path to becoming a continental and eventually world power.
As America grew in strength, its diplomatic corps grew with it. But change was slow. During the 18th and most of the 19th centuries, the U.S. declined to use the term “ambassador” for its foreign plenipotentiaries, believing it reeked of the very European powers and monarchies from which the fledgling American nation had fought to free itself. Finally, in 1893, the U.S. began to use the term “ambassador” to describe its appointed representatives abroad.
In the early 20th century, additional measures were enacted to professionalize America’s diplomatic corps. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft spearheaded efforts to expand and reorganize the State Department. Both believed the practice of appointing diplomats more for their fundraising prowess and connections than for their expertise was ill-suited to America’s status as a rising power.
“The trouble with our ambassadors in stations of real importance,” Roosevelt said, “is that they totally fail to give us real help and real information, and seem to think that the life work of an ambassador is a kind of glorified pink tea party.”
As America’s diplomatic corps grew in size and influence, it often became less responsive to the wishes of presidents and representatives. Presidents as ideologically varied as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon often complained about top State Department bureaucrats blocking and impeding presidential initiatives.
Many occupants of the Oval Office sought to circumvent the State Department, feeling that the agency was obstructive and had too much power unto its own. Roosevelt and his successors frequently turned to “special envoys” or, beginning with Nixon, the National Security Council, to circumvent the State Department and its inertia. Even President Barack Obama, as far from Nixon as could be imagined, empowered the NSC.
The deep state — yes, there is one — hit its high-water mark during the first Trump administration, with career bureaucrats feeling that they and not the democratically elected president should have the decisive say. But that is not and must not be how our system works. Agencies of the executive branch must do what they are told by the executive.
Another complicating factor has been “localitis,” the widely observed phenomenon in which diplomats “go native”, developing an affinity for their assigned country to the detriment of their own nation. This is a common problem with diplomats worldwide. It was so pervasive that George Schultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, would allegedly tell departing diplomats to point on a globe to “their country.” Inevitably, they would point to their assigned duty station only for Schultz to correct them by pointing to the United States.
To rectify these ills, the Trump administration is “reducing barriers to leadership and management roles by emphasizing merit in the selection process.” The agency is also overhauling the Foreign Service Officer test by “adding questions on American history and logical reasoning while eliminating those intended to test alignment with the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda.”
Other tests and exams are slated for revamp to ensure that American diplomats can think and write clearly.
“Lecture content concerning bureaucratic tedium has been reduced to a bare minimum,” the State Department announced in a press release.
In its place will be lectures and training on economic strategy, public speaking, negotiation, commercial diplomacy, and grand strategy. These are the skills that diplomats need, not the divisive DEI nonsense and “localitis” that have run rampant for too long.
TRUMP IS RIGHT TO REARM AMERICA
Shortly after he took office, Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that “the domestic operations of the State Department have grown exponentially, resulting in more bureaucracy, higher costs, and fewer results for the American people.” The State Department, Rubio observed, must discard inertia and move “at the speed of relevancy.” Last March, Rubio said he would submit plans to reorganize and revitalize the department.
In that sense, the State Department’s recently announced reforms are a promise kept. America is best served when its diplomats are empowered and trained to act in our nation’s interest, not in the interest of some far-flung and abstract agenda.
