The death of American diplomacy

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The other day I came across a remarkable statistic. More than half of all US ambassadorships remain unfilled, with 109 vacant out of 195 worldwide. Wars are raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, but there is no permanent US ambassador in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, Russia, Turkey or Ukraine. And that’s before counting the 37 top posts open at the 51 US embassies in Africa, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the serious Ebola outbreak began.

These gaps appear all the way down the diplomatic ladder. According to the Foreign Service Association, some 2,000 diplomats left the foreign service last year, either through lay-offs or early retirements. The exodus accounts for more than 15 per cent of the diplomatic corps, but numbers tell only half the story. Those leaving take with them decades of institutional knowledge, experience in crisis management and specialist language skills, all paid for by the US taxpayer.

All organisations need to move with the times, but these days the US Department of State sounds like a two-bit propaganda shop. Here is the latest offering in response to the (legitimate) outcry in the UK over the death of a young white boy handcuffed by Hampshire police after being stabbed by a Sikh in possession of an eight-inch blade.

There is one large country historically familiar with two-tier policing, but this column is about the death of American diplomacy. In that spirit, I will leave the identity unsaid. Better to return to the essential argument. 

Expertise, institutional memory and professionalism - all these qualities add up to less than a row of beans in the eyes of President Trump. He prizes loyalty, slickness and sycophancy. Pete Hegseth, the muttonhead who heads the Pentagon, aces all three. Yet, in the momentous shift from traditional diplomacy to transactional deal-making, one individual stands out: Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, private equity billionaire and Trump’s top international troubleshooter in his second term.

Kushner, often accompanied by Trump’s ex business partner and real estate billionaire Steve Witkoff, is involved in multiple efforts to settle conflicts ranging from Ukraine to Lebanon, Gaza and the Gulf. He has met with Vladimir Putin in Moscow (though not President Zelensky in Kiev); Bibi Netanyahu in Jerusalem; Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohamed bin Sultan and his arch-rival Emirate Mohamed bin Zayed; and latterly spent 21 hours in Islamabad in an ultimately futile effort to broker a deal with Iranian negotiators to re-open the Strait of Hormuz and deal with Tehran’s outstanding nuclear programme.
In each case, the playbook was the same. Bypass the bureaucracy, ignore process in favour of personal chemistry and appeal to commercial self-interest rather than ideology or engrained policy.

In the world of Kushner-Trump everybody has a price. At the end of the first Trump administration, many assumed that Kushner and his wife Ivanka were done with Washington. Their White House years had proven a chastening experience. The couple were caught between two warring camps. Liberal New York friends were disgusted by their fraternisation with the right. MAGA assassins like Steve Bannon never trusted “Javanka”, viewing the twosome as woke globalists masquerading as true believers in the Trump revolution.

In his memoir Breaking History, Kushner settled scores while giving ample space to his own accomplishments. Reviews were tepid, occasionally vicious. (My favourite is Dwight Garner’s demolition job in the New York Times). But most commentators were so anxious to belittle Kushner that they missed the bigger point: the Trumpist view that traditional statecraft had failed to keep pace with the breakdown of the post-WWII liberal international order, that America had lost out to China and that it was time to tear up the script.

As historian Walter Russell Mead has eloquently explained, the Trumpists were not entirely wrong when they identified the crisis in Pax Americana. But their response in the second Trump term has been nothing short of stupefying. In the opening 18 months of the presidency, Trump has threatened to seize territory from Nato allies (Greenland), stir secession in an allied neighbouring country (Canada), and lend succour to far-right immigration parties in Europe (the UK, France, Germany, and Hungary). At the same time as cultivating a cult of personality worthy of Caesar Augustus, the first emperor of Rome.

Moreover, Trump has consistently treated Vladimir Putin better than America’s allies. Sir Alex Younger, ex head of MI6, said last year that Putin “had played Trump like a violin”. Younger, a top class public servant and spymaster who sadly died prematurely of cancer this week, spoke for many in the British and American intelligence establishment. But Trump still cannot bring himself to support Ukraine, despite Kiev’s courageously inventive drone counteroffensive against Russia which is turning the tide (for now) in the war. The US president continues to support a lop-sided peace deal with Russia seizing control of a vast swathe of Ukraine’s Donbass region and Kiev handing over billions of dollars of mineral rights to the US.

Fortunately, Putin continues to overplay his hand. Trump, sensing there is no chance of a breakthrough (or a Nobel Peace Prize), has lost interest. The reconstruction of Gaza has similarly run into the sands. Trump’s much-vaunted Board of Peace, a thinly disguised alternative to the United Nations, has attracted pledges amounting to several billion dollars but zero deposits, according to a well-sourced FT report. Kushner’s own plans for an AI-powered Gaza, with gleaming towers and luxury amenities, remain castles in the air. Money, it turns out, does not always make the world go round. It is a necessary, but not a sufficient tool to resolve conflict.

It is instructive to compare case-studies in American foreign policy in the Middle East: Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy after the October 1973 war which led to a comprehensive peace treaty between Israel and Egypt; James Baker’s efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after the First Gulf war in 1991; or Bill Clinton’s follow-up drive which came within an ace of success, only to fall because of Yasser Arafat’s obduracy (and perhaps fear for his own life).

In each instance, American administrations completed the hard diplomatic yards, understanding the interests and motivations of the respective parties. In fairness, Kushner and the first Trump administration pulled off a diplomatic triumph in brokering the Abraham Accords which established diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE as well as Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. They broke with the long-held consensus that a resolution of the Palestinian problem was the key to unlocking a wider detente between Israel and its neighbours. Indeed, the prospect of other Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, signing the Abraham Accords was one of the factors in provoking the Hamas barbarous attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023.

The region and the world are still living with the consequences of October 7th. Israel’s decapitation strategy waged against Hamas, Hezbollah and their sponsors in Iran. Trump’s falling for Bibi Netanyahu’s (age-old) sales-pitch that a brittle Iranian regime would topple in the face of overwhelming force. The limits of US military force as an embittered Iranian regime bent on survival discovers it can hold the rest of the world hostage over the Strait of Hormuz through which 25 per cent of the world’s energy supplies flow.

None of the blame for this mess can be led directly to Kushner’s door. Nor to his sidekick Steve Witkoff. The Iranians have sussed that Trump does not have the stomach for a prolonged war (one big difference with Putin). They can see his power leeching away as the mid-term elections approach in November. Whisper it loudly: some House and Senate Republicans are finally showing some spine in standing up to Trump’s excesses.

But there is surely room for a little humility. The art of the deal does not always come down to money. Some people - and some civilisations - actually believe in things.