[Salon] There’s No American Ambassador in Israel

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

There’s No American Ambassador in Israel

Dozens of top U.S. national security posts sit empty amid crisis.

By Robbie Gramer, a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.   https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/09/theres-no-american-ambassador-in-israel/?_hsmi=277697049&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--ZGtdUUQ9ZP-Rep_4kxAZeMQXz63XBys5HTlkIScyMZlf1aUknoJIq4jL5kEPlrlbtMpSlyJ_O5LEM06i9W2NTGsLxIA

October 9, 2023

Just over a week ago, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan boasted that, all things considered, things were going pretty well for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East: “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” he told an audience at an event hosted by the Atlantic. 

That assertion tracked with the bench of top diplomatic officials focused on the Middle East—or lack thereof. As Washington worked to extricate itself from decades of costly wars in the region to focus on a revanchist Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and ramping up global competition against China, numerous key senior national security posts overseeing the Middle East have sat empty for months or even years. Few in Washington raised alarm bells about it. Those who did were, for the most part, politely ignored.

The massive assault on Israel by terrorist group Hamas—the deadliest attack Israel has faced since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War—has thrust the Middle East back to the forefront of U.S. national security. The Biden administration, caught flat-footed, has leapt into crisis-response mode. But the number of seasoned and Senate-confirmed top officials to lead that response is sorely lacking.

At the time of the deadly Hamas attack on Israel, Washington’s closest ally in the Middle East, the United States had no confirmed ambassadors to Israel, Egypt, Oman, or Kuwait. The State Department’s top counterterrorism envoy position has sat empty for more than two years, the top human rights envoy position—the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor—has been unfilled for the entirety of the Biden administration, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has not had a top Middle East official in nearly three years.

These statistics offer a snapshot into how Washington’s hyper-partisanship is infecting foreign policy and serve as a preview of how numerous empty posts could hobble—though not entirely derail—the Biden administration’s ability to craft an effective response to the developing war between Israel and terrorist groups in the Palestinian territories.

“The State Department isn’t [the Department of Defense]: We don’t have weapon systems; we have diplomats, armed with experience and hard-won expertise,” said Alan Eyre, a retired senior State Department diplomat. “Not having Senate-vetted and -confirmed ambassadors in the field during a crisis is like fighting a battle with needed weaponry sitting in storage.”

The mostly empty bench is due to a nearly broken Senate confirmation process, where nominees have languished in limbo for months or even years due to the “new normal” practice of Republican senators placing sweeping holds on all nominees for different agencies over policy disputes with the administration. On the Pentagon side, hundreds of senior military posts are on indefinite pause due to Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s blanket hold on nominees over the Biden administration’s abortion access policies for the military—including senior officials at U.S. Central Command, which oversees the Middle East. At the State Department, Republican Sen. Rand Paul has held numerous nominees over access to documents on the origins of COVID-19, while fellow Republican Sens. J.D. Vance and Ted Cruz have also previously issued holds.

Republicans, meanwhile, blame the Biden administration for not working to meet them halfway on policy disputes and dawdling on congressional outreach and Senate Democrats for not prioritizing floor votes on national security nominees that could override these blanket holds in an otherwise jampacked Senate schedule.

The end result is an under-equipped team composed of many lower-ranking officials in acting capacities fighting the biggest fire that part of the Middle East has seen in years—a crisis that could derail the Biden administration’s efforts to normalize ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia. In public, administration officials insist their team is well-equipped to respond to the crisis and support Israel. In private, they concede that they’re starting this diplomatic offensive with serious handicaps.

All top Pentagon, USAID, and State Department posts, including ambassadors, require a presidential nomination and Senate confirmation. Unfilled posts are still covered by lower-ranking officials in acting capacities. But those acting officials don’t have the gravitas, legitimacy, or access in foreign capitals that a full-fledged ambassador has, no matter how skilled and experienced they are.

One senior career diplomat with decades of experience compared a well-rooted U.S. ambassador in a foreign capital to a seatbelt in a car: something that’s nice to have in normal times—until there is a major emergency, when it becomes absolutely necessary. On the crisis in Israel, the effects of this empty bench may be hard to discern from the outside but are still likely to gum up the works in Washington’s interagency process and hobble a more effective response in the region.

Sen. Chris Murphy, a leading Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, decried the lack of confirmed officials. “This is an all hands on deck moment in history, and the administration needs a Senate-confirmed American diplomat present in every capital in the region as soon as possible,” he said in a statement on Sunday.

The House side, which has no say over nominees but outsized power on any new funding the United States could prepare for aid to Israel, is facing a crisis of its own after a small faction of far-right Republicans ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

“I look at the world and all the threats that are out there. And what kind of message are we sending to our adversaries when we can’t govern? While we’re dysfunctional? When we don’t even have a speaker of the House?” lamented Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in an interview with CNN on Sunday. McCaul said Republicans needed to quickly elect a new speaker to begin ginning up support—both financial and political—for Israel, in response to the ongoing crisis.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, now chaired by Sen. Ben Cardin after Sen. Bob Menendez stepped down amid a corruption indictment scandal, is preparing to rush a confirmation hearing on Biden’s Israel ambassador nominee this week, three Senate sources said, though no official announcement has yet been made. Biden’s nominee, former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, could face grueling questioning from Republicans on the Biden administration’s policies toward Iran, but Democrats want to expedite his confirmation, nonetheless.

A similar scenario played out more than two months ago when another crisis caught Washington off guard, that time in the restive Sahel region of Africa. In Niger, a military coup in July derailed the West’s burgeoning partnership with a West African government seen as central to counterterrorism campaigns in the region. The U.S. ambassador nominee to Niger, seasoned diplomat Kathleen FitzGibbon, had sat waiting in Senate nomination limbo for nearly a year. In a rare spurt of ex post facto efficiency, the Senate rushed to confirm her, but only after the coup leaders had cemented their grip on power.

Murphy and others in the Senate hope that Congress can set aside partisan politics to confirm senior diplomats for the sake of national security.

Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @RobbieGramer