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.
