Earlier this month, amid a slew of other news and on the same day as a botched release of comically almost-redacted files from the Epstein case, Donald Trump fired about 30 ambassadors who had been appointed under Joe Biden.
These are career diplomats, people whose work spanned multiple presidencies, including Trump’s first term. Their mission is to represent the interests and people of the United States in difficult and contentious environments around the world, often unstable nations in Africa and Asia. They serve for a couple of years before being reassigned in short terms designed to ensure that diplomats continue to see themselves as servants of the American people rather than long-term residents of their host nations.
Illustration by Dionne Gain
They are distinct from politically appointed ambassadors, who the president chooses. Each president nominates about 40 countries to which they send politically appointed ambassadors, who are usually friends of or donors to the president. They are usually sent to nations that are key US allies, such as major European nations and countries such as Australia, where former president Biden appointed Caroline Kennedy, daughter of president John F. Kennedy, to serve as ambassador in Canberra. There are also the caricatured examples of holiday destinations, such as sending former NFL star Herschel Walker to be the ambassador to the Bahamas.
Trump may replace the 30 career ambassadors he sacked with politically appointed ambassadors, who generally don’t have the experience to navigate the delicate path of diplomacy in complex environments. Or he won’t replace them at all.
This is because, in Trump’s view, the geopolitical network of the 21st century is fundamentally and irreparably broken. The bloody conflicts and decades-long entanglements of the modern American empire are, in his version, the result of an overcomplicated system. Trump’s actions suggest he sees the possibility only of individual relationships in the ruins of postwar institutions that have collapsed under their own weight in a world where leaders can speak to each other directly. We’ve seen this in his flashy summits with Volodymyr Zelensky, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and the hosting of plenty of other leaders at Mar-a-Lago.
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These ambassadorial firings are a year-end emblem of his foreign policy. In the past year, we have seen a wholesale change in how American power works. Under previous presidents, power was projected via this diplomatic apparatus. Careful negotiations were carried out by the thousands of diplomats whose posts spanned the globe, and programs that began in one administration would continue in some form in the next. Now, there are no sitting ambassadors in Australia, Ukraine, Russia, Saudi Arabia or Germany, places where the US would benefit from having strategic direction in the relationship, rather than relying on Riyadh’s ability to interpret Trump’s latest social media post.
Australia has not had a credentialled US ambassador for about 13 months, though gaps like this have become increasingly common this century. This lapse in particular says much about the lack of focus on the Asia-Pacific region, where Trump sees his phone calls with Xi as the only conversations that matter for power in the region, even as Xi sends his military to surround Taiwan for military drills this week.
Many of the agencies doing this hard diplomatic work were bled dry or cut entirely in the first tumultuous months of the second Trump administration. Now, rather than diplomats advocating for the US as a global superpower and cultivating the kind of long-term relationships that could ultimately counter China’s rise, the focus has shifted to Trump’s personal brand – when his attention span allows for it.
