Distressing Foreign Affairs Day
The Department of State billed the 60th annual Foreign Affairs Day on May 2 as a celebration of six decades of “foreign affairs excellence.” Unfortunately, this year there has been little to celebrate. Through untargeted tariffs, abolition of key agencies, threats to annex foreign territories and denigration of once-shared values, the Trump Administration has alienated allies, sapped our soft power and tarnished America’s name. Almost everything I worked for in my 26-year Foreign Service career to promote US national security is being discredited and discarded.
The 60th anniversary ceremony itself was stained by ideology and pettiness.
Ideology: The Director General’s Foreign Service Cup Award was given not to a foreign service officer who promoted American statesmanship, strength, or commerce, but rather to one who focused on border security and visa fraud. These are worthy fields of endeavor, for sure. But the awardee gave away his main qualification when in his acceptance speech he lashed out at DEI policies. As reinterpreted privately by an attendee, diversity, equality and inclusion efforts have prevented mediocre white men from achieving their ambassadorial dreams.
Pettiness: The day before the event, the president of an organization of foreign affairs professionals was disinvited from presenting the DACOR Foreign Service Cup at the State Department. (DACOR = Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired, but nobody uses the full name anymore.) No reason was given, but rumor had it that decision-makers disliked the awardee, former Ambassador Nick Burns, and what he presumably would say.
Indeed, the remarks Burns gave instead at the DACOR Bacon House at 1801 F St. NW strayed, shall we say, from the MAGA line. Diversity of personnel strengthens our diplomacy, he said. Defunding Voice of America and Radio Free Asia cedes the public diplomacy field to China. The Administration’s policies, he assessed, have amounted to “unilateral disarmament of America’s diplomatic strength.”
Yet Burns also relayed how in his farewell speech to China mission staff in January, he encouraged them to support President Trump and his new ambassador, “because that’s what we do.” Burns did not need to remind his audience, though he did so anyway, that diplomats are non-partisan and work for whomever the American people elect. Also, that his embassy, like every other US mission, put America first in everything they did. Those words would have resonated well at the State Department, were Burns not made de facto persona non grata.
On the sidelines of the Foreign Affairs Day events, I learned, to my dismay, that the last office I ran at the State Department will be eliminated under Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s reorganization plan. It is the policy coordination office of the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation (though under different names in my time). We coordinated policies to counter the spread of weapons of mass destruction to Iran, Syria, North Korea and other troublesome countries. Our mission was high on the agenda of every administration, except, apparently, the current one, which doesn’t even have a senior director for nonproliferation at the National Security Council staff to coordinate policy implementation across agencies.
Most of the staff in my former office are highly expert civil servants who work long hours to keep the world’s most dangerous weapons out of the hands of potential adversaries. What will become of this expertise? When positions in the civil service are axed, the holders of those positions typically lose their jobs. Under the hiring freeze, who will replace them? I hesitate to think the Rubio team would be so stupid as to let these experts go. But then again, this is the Trump Administration, where the standard operating procedure is to fire first and aim later.
Mark Fitzpatrick is a retired US diplomat who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Non-Proliferation. He is an Associate Fellow at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, where he produced ten books on nuclear dangers, He is a member of Steady State, among other affiliations. His views expressed here are personal.