This is How Diplomacy Dies

Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers and author of the Declaration of Independence, was also the first Secretary of State. Like George Washington, he wanted to avoid ‘entangling alliances,’ but also wanted to stress foreign commerce.

Through forced exits, ideological enforcement, and institutional neglect, the State Department is being transformed into a tool of loyalty rather than a source of expertise.

On the first day of Donald Trump’s first term in office, he fired every American ambassador appointed by his predecessor, demanding that they leave their offices by noon on January 20, without exception. Some 80 ambassadors for countries, international organizations, and agencies, and issues were summarily dismissed, with no replacements named. Departing from tradition, the dismissals also included career government personnel serving as ambassadors, who ordinarily would be allowed to serve out their terms before being replaced. From that point on, he showed a preference for appointing friends or relatives to deal with foreign affairs, sidelining the Department of State, and often referring to it as the ‘Deep’ State. His first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, and Tillerson’s successor, Mike Pompeo, resisted some of Trump’s more egregious actions, despite his blatant disdain for the personnel responsible for conducting American diplomacy.

Fast forward to Trump 2.0, and the guardrails providing a modicum of protection for America’s career diplomats have been, to use one of Trump’s favorite terms, “completely obliterated,” with the appointment of Marco Rubio. Rubio, the former US Senator from Florida, has demonstrated nothing but fealty to Trump’s efforts to complete the dismantling of anything resembling professional American diplomacy.

The administration’s actions to destroy American diplomacy have been blatant and deliberate, but unprecedented only in their scope and cruelty.

American political leaders have always had a jaundiced view of diplomats, beginning with America’s first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in a March 1800 statement:

“The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign affairs. Let the General Government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our General Government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants”

Thomas’s quote has often been truncated to “America only needs commercial counselors, not diplomats.” That is greatly overstating it, but this country’s leaders have, from the very beginning, been uncomfortable with ‘traditional’ diplomacy, often preferring personal envoys to solve specific problems, and interpreting ‘disentanglement’ from the affairs of other nations as a call for isolationism. Before 1893, for instance, the U.S. appointed senior representatives as Ministers rather than Ambassadors. There were no career American diplomats until the creation of the U.S. Foreign Service by The Foreign Service Act of 1924, which combined the diplomatic service and consular service into one organization whose employees were chosen on merit rather than by the spoils system.

What we’ve seen since January 2025, however, is a full-throated return, not just to the pre-1924 spoils system, but a perversion of Washington and Jefferson’s ‘avoid foreign entanglements’ caution in ways that neither of the Founding Fathers would be likely to recognize.

During the first year of his second term in office, Trump has engaged in transactional diplomacy, gunboat diplomacy, and scattershot, unpredictable diplomacy, all without career diplomats. To ensure that our diplomatic missions abroad adhere to his ‘America First’ policy, he abruptly pulled 30 career ambassadors and other senior career diplomats from their overseas posts. The recalled personnel were ordered to ‘find other jobs,’ or resign. The posts they vacated have remained vacant. According to the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), as of April 2026, Trump has appointed only 6 career diplomats to ambassadorial or senior foreign service positions of the 76 total appointments. In the first seven months of his second term, he forced nearly 10 percent of the federal workforce from their jobs, which included a one-day layoff of 1,300 State Department employees. The layoffs were conducted without consultation with AFSA, as it usually would, and without providing a logical justification for individual cuts, leaving embassies and offices in Washington bereft of experienced employees to address multiple global crises.

Within the State Department, in addition to forcing out many senior, experienced people, which deprives the nation of centuries of institutional memory, all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) practices, rules, individuals, and organizations were banned; employees were forbidden to engage in employee union activities on duty time, and the only affinity group that was recognized by Rubio’s State Department was the Benjamin Franklin Fellowship, an organization of conservative-leaning department personnel. America First principles have also been instituted in the State Department’s National Foreign Affairs Training Center (NAFTC) curriculum and in the administration of the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT), imposing Trump’s ideology and personal loyalty requirements on the selection and indoctrination of America’s diplomats for decades to come.

We can see in real time the damage that Trump’s erratic, unpredictable, chaotic, transactional worldview is doing to American diplomacy and the world order that the United States helped create in the aftermath of World War II. Sudden cuts in foreign aid programs have led to thousands of preventable deaths in the world’s poorer countries, and undercut trust in the U.S. around the world. While loyalty to the decisions and policies of the elected leadership has always been a requirement of the career diplomatic service, there was also a duty to advise on problematic decisions and to push back against directives that violated the Constitution. In this administration, that is no longer the case. Employees are either afraid to speak out or have been selected based on their personal loyalty and choose not to.

Over time, this new reality can become the new normal. This mindset will have infected the institution from top to bottom. The trust that has been broken will not be easily restored. In the meantime, American diplomacy will be but a ghost of its former self. Where American diplomats were, even in countries where our policies were not liked, they were viewed with a modicum of respect; we will be ignored or vilified. We will have gone from being the antithesis of the autocratic societies we stood against to being ‘just another jackboot dictatorship.’

A house can be burned down in minutes. This is something I know from personal experience. But that house takes months to rebuild. We’re watching the deconstruction of American diplomacy, and it’s not in slow motion. The foundation is still there, but for how long, and what will it take to rebuild?

These are questions that every American should be asking—and to which they should be demanding answers.

Charles A. Ray served 20 years in the U.S. Army, including two tours in Vietnam. He retired as a senior US diplomat, serving 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, with assignments as ambassador to the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Republic of Zimbabwe, and was the first American consul general in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He also served in senior positions with the Department of Defense and is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 390 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.