What Happens When America Breaks Its Own Institutions
By Patrick Theros - February 21, 2026
The current debate over American foreign policy focuses on what the United States should do abroad. It ignores the destruction of the professional machinery that once informed presidents what would happen after they took a decision. We are missing something more basic and far more dangerous: the United States is gutting the institutions required to conduct any coherent foreign policy at all, regardless of what strategy a future president might choose.
I write this not as an observer but as someone who spent nearly four decades inside that machinery. Whatever one thinks of Trump’s particular policies (I even agree with some), the destruction of the Foreign Service itself is something else entirely. It exposes our country to dangers we will not see coming.
The Trump administration has replaced institutional competence with personal improvisation. The president is often effective at bullying allies, particularly European governments, sometimes with productive results, sometimes not. But public theatrics do not substitute for preparation. Professionals exist to advise a president not on how to stage a performance, but on how to achieve his objectives without being forced into retreat days later.
That approach collapses entirely when applied to hardened authoritarian systems. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping do not respond to charm. They respond to sustained pressure, careful signaling, and institutional memory. Instead, the administration has repeatedly sent amateur envoys and business associates to negotiate with some of the most experienced diplomatic professionals on earth. Sending untrained men, certain of their own brilliance, to face negotiators who have spent their lives dismantling exactly that kind of certainty is not diplomacy but exhibitionism.
This absence of professional diplomacy now complicates negotiations with Iran. Trump has opened in familiar New York business fashion proclaiming maximalist red lines: no enrichment, no long-range missiles, no proxy support, no repression at home. He appears to expect that Iran will counter, the red lines will disappear, and a partial concession can be marketed domestically as victory. But the Iranian negotiators are not a Manhattan real estate board. They assume they are facing the full institutional weight of American diplomacy, not an improvised circle around a single powerful individual who is badly out of his depth.
Details that seem trivial to a layman can be decisive. A one-percent change in enrichment levels, for example, can dramatically complicate Iran’s nuclear timetable. Career diplomats and technical experts understand the leverage hidden in such margins. A negotiator does not risk trading substance for headlines. Power exercised without preparation cannot survive contact with professionals who better understand the terrain.
The damage is not confined to headline negotiations. America’s loss of diplomatic capacity erodes American interests every day. Embassies support American business quietly and without credit. Commercial officers provide intelligence that helps US firms find customers, identify partners, and avoid bad actors. When an American company is shaken down or asked for a bribe, it is often the embassy that intervenes. At least it was, until enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was suspended, stripping diplomats of one of their most effective tools for defending honest firms.
Few Americans understand how much of what they take for granted abroad depends on functioning embassies. They are where citizens turn when a child is born overseas, a passport is stolen, a protest turns violent, or a country collapses overnight. In every modern crisis -- earthquakes, coups, sudden unrest -- consular officers are the first responders, improvising evacuations while Washington is still finding its footing.
That diplomatic presence is also the foundation of intelligence. Embassies generate most actionable knowledge through daily contact with political leaders, officers, business elites, journalists, clerics, opposition figures, and taxi drivers. They understand rivalries, taboos, and historical memory. Intelligence agencies supply what cannot be gathered openly but rely on embassies for context and judgment. Satellites can count tanks, but without diplomats on the ground they cannot perceive intent. In late 1973 a senior Israeli intelligence officer told me Egypt and Syria surprised Israel because “we knew where every tank was, but we had no idea what the men in the tanks were thinking.”
Reduce embassies to skeleton staffs and intelligence loses its compass. Close them and it loses context altogether. The most devastating example remains Iraq. After the US Embassy in Baghdad closed in 1991, America spent twelve years without diplomatic presence. When forces returned in 2003, we lacked lived knowledge of Iraqi society and power structures. The occupation failed not because intelligence was absent, but because it was untethered from reality. In its place we relied on the fantasies of an exile, Ahmed Chalabi, who hoped we would crown him king.
The hollowing out of expertise also invites policy capture by host governments. The American ambassador in Ankara, Thomas Barrack, arrived from private equity and real estate with no diplomatic background. Since taking up his post he has behaved less like a representative of the United States than as a well-documented advocate for Erdogan’s ambitions, echoing visions of Turkish primacy stretching from Greece to Iraq and controlling the Eastern Mediterranean. In a functioning system, a deep bench of professionals would push back, reminding an ambassador which country he serves. Today that bench has been largely dismissed. When institutions are stripped away, personal enthusiasms fill the vacuum.
The administration’s dismissal of large numbers of career ambassadors, many serving in Africa, signals a deliberate abandonment of diplomacy. Africa is the fastest-growing continent in the world, rich in critical minerals and political influence that will shape the next half-century. Pulling back severs early-warning systems and surrenders influence to adversaries who are patient, present, and professional.
Foreign policy is not conducted by Truth Social posts or phone calls. It is conducted by slow, imperfect systems that accumulate knowledge over decades. Presidents come and go. Institutions endure. What we shatter now cannot be reassembled quickly when the next crisis erupts.
The danger, then, is less that President Trump is pursuing an unconventional policy than that he is destroying the tools required for any policy at all. The anger many of us feel is not ideological; it is professional and patriotic. When diplomacy is reduced to spectacle and intelligence stripped of context, the United States does not become more effective; it becomes blind, brittle, and slow to react. History suggests that nations in that condition do not choose their next crisis. It chooses them.
A nation can survive bad decisions; it may not survive breaking institutions that all the king’s men and all the king’s horses cannot put back together again.