If Showing Up Is Half the Battle…
In the summer of 2018, James Melville, a senior career diplomat, resigned from his post as U.S. ambassador to Estonia in protest to former President Donald Trump’s tirades against European allies.
This week, career U.S. diplomat George Kent (whom you may remember as a witness from Trump’s first impeachment trial) was sworn in as the next U.S. ambassador to Estonia, officials told SitRep.
But for the time in between—four and a half years—that ambassador post has sat empty, despite Estonia’s outsized role in the West’s response to Russia’s war in Ukraine and its role as an important U.S. NATO ally.
That four-and-a-half-year gap is part of a trend that represents what veteran national security officials and experts call a grave and unjustified own-goal in U.S. foreign policy, as we report with our colleague Christina Lu.
Missing in action. Around the world, dozens of U.S. ambassador posts have sat empty for months or even years on end, the result of an increasingly broken and politicized confirmation process.
Countries that haven’t had a U.S. ambassador in place for a year or longer include: India, one of the United States’ most important partners in its strategy to counter China; Ethiopia, a country wracked by a deadly conflict and one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises; Italy, a major NATO ally; Colombia, one of Washington’s most important Latin American allies and a major player in the Western response to Venezuela’s ongoing humanitarian and political crisis; and Saudi Arabia, the Gulf ally under increasing scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers over its dismal human rights records.
All those posts are filled in acting capacities by lower-ranking diplomats, but they don’t have the same clout within the embassy or host government as an ambassador picked by the president and confirmed by the Senate. They are also often overstretched to make up for the absence of an ambassador.
Washington just can’t quit dysfunction. U.S. President Joe Biden vowed to restore the State Department after the Trump era, but this problem hasn’t gone away.
Biden’s ambassador pick to India, former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, is still stuck in the Senate, mired in controversy, more than a year and a half after he was nominated. “When you try for nearly two years and you can’t get him through a Senate controlled by your own party, then maybe you say this isn’t happening, and moreover we really need an ambassador to India,” one senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told SitRep. And Biden has yet to even name a nominee to be ambassador to Italy, two years into his presidency. “Behind the scenes, the Italians are really pissed,” a second State Department official said.
The White House told us in response to our latest story on this that it is continuing to seek “the swift confirmation of many crucial, highly-qualified nominees.” On Garcetti, a White House spokesperson said that “we continue to believe he is an experienced candidate with bipartisan support who deserves swift confirmation to a post of crucial importance to our national security.”
But even beyond that, the Senate confirmation process is becoming more drawn out and increasingly politicized, sometimes with career ambassador nominees caught in the crossfire, being held up for months or even years as points of leverage for a senator to extract a concession out of the White House that has nothing to do with the qualifications of the nominee in question—or simply because the Senate schedule is jampacked and processing ambassador nominees gets sidelined for other legislation.
It ain’t like the good ole days. Back in the halcyon days of the post-Cold War era, when the United States was the undisputed global leader, perhaps it could afford to let ambassador posts sit empty for years. That’s all changing with China emerging as a rival global superpower, leaving Washington scrambling to play catch-up in a game of geopolitical influence and clout across the world (just look at the case of the Solomon Islands as one example).
China now has more embassies and consulates around the world than the United States, and unlike Washington, Beijing doesn’t let its ambassador posts sit empty for years on end. “There’s a perception within the foreign-policy establishment that we still run the world and the rest of the world just has to tolerate our peculiarities and annoying characteristics,” the first senior State Department official said. “But that’s a big mistake, and it’s certainly one that China is not making.”