President Donald Trump is ordering dozens of U.S. ambassadors around the world to leave their posts and return to the country within weeks. It's yet another precedent-breaking maneuver by the president to remold the U.S. diplomatic apparatus into a more overtly political arm of government.
According to The New York Times, the nearly 30 ambassadors being recalled are career diplomats — foreign service officers who typically serve under presidents of either party and whose terms usually run their course without intervention from a new president. That makes them different from political appointee ambassadors, who are expected to resign when a new president comes on. (That's what former President Joe Biden's politically appointed diplomats did when Trump took office in January.)
Nikki Gamer, a spokesperson for the American Foreign Service Association, the union that represents career diplomats, told the Times that the union "can say definitively that such a mass recall has never happened since the founding of the Foreign Service as we know it."
Trump's mass recall represents yet another example of how he's gutting vital institutional knowledge associated with what he and his supporters derisively call "the deep state" in Washington. The effect is a loss of credentialed, nonpartisan civil experts whose experience is incredibly valuable for achieving U.S. foreign policy goals and managing everything from mitigating conflict to foreign investment to helping Americans stuck in a foreign country during a disaster.
This is a preview of Zeeshan Aleem's latest column. Read the full column here.
