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Top Diplomats Fleeing As Trump Wrecks State Department

Top Diplomats Fleeing As Trump Wrecks State Department

Colin Powell was right.

The former Republican secretary of state late last year warned that Donald Trump’s callous, shortsighted foreign policy agenda, where diplomats were ignored and countries often insulted via Twitter, was gutting the U.S. State Department.

According to a new McClatchy report, “60 percent of the State Departments’ top-ranking career diplomats have left and new applications to join the foreign service have fallen by half.”

This comes in the wake of Trump’s vulgar, racist comments about not wanting black immigrants arriving in the U.S. from “shithole” countries, like ones in Africa.

With Trump vowing to slash the State Department’s budget, while simultaneously undercutting Secretary of States Rex Tillerson, more and more staffers and diplomats are heading for the door.

“Others have wrestled with staying, feeling unsure whether they’re protecting U.S. influence or contributing to its erosion,” McClatchy reports. “Many diplomats had never contemplated leaving State, always intending instead to make U.S. diplomacy their life’s work and long-term career track.”

That career track often begins by joining the Foreign Service, which is seen as the backbone of the U.S. diplomatic corps. But under Trump, applications have plummeted.

He’s having the exact opposite effect that President Barack Obama did. Applications spiked to a new high in June 2009, soon after Obama was inaugurated. And between 2009 and 2012, the Obama administration expanded the number of Foreign Service employees by 21 percent.

Why the stampede away from Trump by diplomats and would-be diplomats?

Last August, Trump thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for expelling American diplomats from his country because it would save the U.S. “a lot of money,” a comment that stunned State Department employees. (Trump later claimed he was being sarcastic.)

During a Fox News interview in November, Trump said that he was not concerned about the huge number of unfilled jobs in the State Department because, in his view, “I’m the only one that matters.”

And then there was the “shithole” fiasco, after which in at least one African country, the U.S. ambassador was summoned by the host government and asked if Trump considered that country to be among the “shithole” ones he denigrated during an Oval Office meeting.

“It’s one thing for us to go in and slam our hands on the table and say this is what we want,” one U.S. official told McClatchy. “It’s another to denigrate them and make it crystal clear this is what our leadership thinks about them in the vulgarest of terms.”

By all indications, Trump wants the State Department gutted. As of now, he’s succeeding.

 

Danziger: That Sly Putin

Danziger: That Sly Putin

Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings, syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group, are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for the Rutland Herald, the New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. Danziger has published ten books of cartoons and a novel about the Vietnam War. He served in Vietnam as a linguist and intelligence officer, earning a Bronze Star and the Air Medal. Born in New York City, he now lives in Manhattan and Vermont. A video of the artist at work can be viewed here.

Top Priority For Lame-Duck Senate: Vote On Obama Nominations

Top Priority For Lame-Duck Senate: Vote On Obama Nominations

By William Douglas, McClatchy Washington Bureau (MCT)

WASHINGTON — State Department officials and Washington’s diplomatic community are pressing the Senate to address a backlog of ambassadorial nominations during Congress’ post-election lame-duck session.

They fear that if the Republicans win control of the Senate, the already sluggish pace of voting on President Barack Obama’s nominees will worsen over the next two years.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen in the elections,” said Kristen Fernekes, a spokeswoman for the 17,000-member American Foreign Service Association. “We don’t know what’s going to happen in the lame duck. We’re deeply concerned about this becoming the new normal, and we don’t want to see it take 400, 300, 200 days to get people to their posts.”

Senate Democratic leaders say dealing with hundreds of pending nominations — ambassadorial, judicial and administration — will be a major thrust of the lame-duck session when Congress returns to Washington Nov. 12.

But confronted with a legislative to-do list that also includes keeping the federal government funded beyond Dec.11 to avert a shutdown, Senate Democratic officials concede that lawmakers won’t plow through all the nominations during the lame-duck session.

That means those who aren’t confirmed before the 113th Congress adjourns would have to be re-nominated when the 114th Congress convenes in January, a lengthy process that would involve hearings and committee votes as well as Senate floor action.

“Time is a finite commodity,” said Adam Jentleson, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). “We’ll do as many as we can, regardless” of the outcome of the election.

Democrats and several political analysts foresee difficulties for the White House in getting its nominees confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who stands to become the chamber’s majority leader if his party wins control in the coming elections, has vowed to restore so-called “regular order” to the Senate, a process in which legislation and nominations go through committees before being debated and voted on by the full Senate.

But political observers predict that a Republican-run Senate would slow the pace of addressing Obama’s nominees, already at a trickle, even further.

Currently, 47 ambassadorial nominees are awaiting confirmation for assignments in 54 countries such as Argentina, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Norway, Rwanda and Jamaica. Of the 47 nominees, eight are awaiting confirmation hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The vacancies spawn from partisan feuding between Senate Democrats and Republicans and from complaints that Obama has nominated an unusually high percentage of political supporters rather than career diplomats for ambassadorships.

At one point over the summer, more than a quarter of the world’s countries didn’t have a U.S. ambassador. Just before adjourning in August and September, senators confirmed ten ambassadors, including for Sierra Leone, an epicenter of the Ebola virus outbreak, and for Turkey, a key country in the fight against the Islamic State.

Now State Department and diplomatic officials are pressing the Senate to take up the rest of the backlog.

“The vast majority of our nominees could be confirmed quickly in one en bloc vote just like military nominees as soon as the Senate returns to Washington,” Alec Gerlach, a State Department spokesman, said Wednesday.

That request could face stiff resistance.

In July, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tried to move a block of ambassadorial nominees to the Senate floor. But Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) objected in protest of Reid’s change of Senate rules making it difficult for senators to filibuster administration and judicial nominations.

As to whether Enzi would object to en bloc nominations during the lame-duck session, Daniel Head, an Enzi spokesman, said, “The majority leader sets floor votes. We’ll see what the remaining session looks like when we come back into session.”

Republican senators also may want separate votes on individual nominees to show their displeasure over the number of politically connected people Obama has chosen over career diplomats.

Of the 47 nominees awaiting confirmation, 13 are considered political. They have limited international diplomacy experience or worked for the Obama administration or his presidential campaigns.

Historically, presidents have adhered to a “70-30” combination: 70 percent of nominees being career diplomats, 30 percent are political backers.

Since taking office in 2009, 64.8 percent of Obama’s picks have been careerists and 35.2 percent political, according to American Foreign Service Association statistics.

So far in his second term, 58.6 percent of Obama’s ambassadorial nominees are careerists and 41.4 percent political. Of the 47 nominees awaiting full Senate votes or Foreign Relations Committee approval, 13 are political.

To get as many people confirmed as possible during the lame-duck session, State Department officials and the foreign service association have suggested that senators move ahead with the nominations of career diplomats.

“We know that foreign service officers have respect on both sides of the aisle,” Fernekes said. “We would hope as a goodwill gesture that they would at least confirm career nominees.”

The foreign service association has mounted a full-court press. Since July, representatives of the group have spoken with the White House and met with 20 senators — most of them Republicans — in hopes of moving nominations forward.

“We don’t know when the next nation will arise that will be on the nightly news” because of a crisis, Fernekes said. “We need to have fully staffed embassies.”

AFP Photo/Paul J. Richards

Iraq Wins Pledge Of Military Support Against IS Militants

Iraq Wins Pledge Of Military Support Against IS Militants

Paris (AFP) — The world’s top diplomats pledged Monday to support Iraq in its fight against Islamic State militants by “any means necessary”, including “appropriate military assistance”, as leaders stressed the urgency of the crisis.

Representatives from around 30 countries and international organisations, including the United States, Russia and China, gathered in Paris as the brutal beheading over the weekend of a third Western hostage focussed participants’ minds.

The pledge came as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry stepped up efforts to forge a broad anti-jihadist coalition.

In a joint statement issued after the talks, diplomats vowed to support Baghdad “by any means necessary, including appropriate military assistance, in line with the needs expressed by the Iraqi authorities, in accordance with international law and without jeopardising civilian security.”

They stressed IS extremists were “a threat not only to Iraq but also to the entire international community” and underscored the “urgent need” to remove them from Iraq, where they control some 40 percent of its territory.

However, the final statement made no mention of Syria, where the extremists hold a quarter of the country and where the regime of Bashar al-Assad still had friends around the Paris conference table, including Russia.

Opening the conference, French President Francois Hollande emphasised there was “no time to lose” in the fight against the jihadists.

“The fight of the Iraqis against terrorism is our fight as well,” Hollande stressed, urging “clear, loyal and strong” global support for Baghdad.

– All bases covered –

Iraqi President Fuad Masum also stressed the urgency of the crisis, saying there was a risk the militants could overrun more countries in the region.

“We are still asking for regular aerial operations against terrorist sites. We have to pursue them wherever they are. We need to dry up their sources of finance,” added the Iraqi leader.

The international community is scrambling to contain the IS jihadists — who have rampaged across Iraq and Syria and could number as many as 31,500 fighters, according to the CIA.

As if to underscore the urgency of the campaign, France’s defence minister announced just hours ahead of the conference it was joining Britain in carrying out reconnaissance flights in support of the U.S. air campaign against the jihadists.

Shortly afterwards, two French Rafale fighter jets took off from the Al-Dhafra base in the United Arab Emirates, an AFP correspondent reported.

The Paris conference was one of a series of diplomatic gatherings in the run-up to a United Nations General Assembly later this week.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said meetings would come “thick and fast” in the coming days and his French counterpart Laurent Fabius said there would soon be a conference on Islamic State funding organised by Bahrain.

Kerry has been criss-crossing the region in a bid to build as broad a coalition as possible and said over the weekend that “all bases were covered” in terms of implementing U.S. President Barack Obama’s strategy to destroy the jihadists.

Obama’s plan includes air strikes in Syria and expanded operations in Iraq, where U.S. aircraft have carried out more than 160 strikes since early August.

The U.S. leader also foresees training “moderate” Syrian rebels to take on IS and to reconstitute the Iraqi army, parts of which fled an IS blitzkrieg across northern and western Iraq.

While there was no mention of Syria in the final statement, Hollande said the international community “needs to find a durable solution in the place where the (IS) movement was born. In Syria.”

“The chaos is benefiting the terrorists. We therefore need to support those who can negotiate and make the required compromises to secure the future of Syria,” said Hollande.

“They are the forces of the democratic opposition. They need to be backed by all means,” added the president.

– ‘Dirty hands’ –

The coalition received a boost when Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott pledged to deploy 600 troops to the United Arab Emirates, a regional Washington ally.

Ten Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, are among the countries backing the coalition.

Speaking in Paris, a U.S. official said the number of countries signing on was “going up almost every hour”, from Europe and the Middle East right across to Japan, South Korea and New Zealand.

However, Iran, which was not invited to the conference, said it had rejected U.S. overtures to help in the fight against the militants.

“Right from the start, the United States asked through its ambassador in Iraq whether we could cooperate,” supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a statement on his official website.

“I said no, because they have dirty hands,” said Khamenei, who has the final say on all matters of state in Iran.

He accused Washington of seeking a “pretext to do in Iraq and Syria what it already does in Pakistan — bomb anywhere without authorisation.”

The United States insisted Monday that it was opposed to military cooperation with Iran, but was open to further talks.

The gruesome beheading of British aid worker David Haines increased the urgency of the Paris talks.

Haines was the third Western hostage to be beheaded by the militants in less than a month. IS released a video Saturday showing his killing and issued a death threat against another British captive, Alan Henning.

AFP Photo/Ali al-Saadi

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