US 'diplomats' are campaigns big donors, or primary supports. I've eaten with someone who expected to be named diplomat in Europe because he supported Obama by 2007, but was one-uped by a richer donor post-primary.
I think it’s fair to say that diplomats appear to be appointed under a two-faced system.
On the one side you have some diplomats who really are quite capable career foreign policy wonks, appointed in a manner which appears to be meritocratic.
On the other side you have folks appointed, like you mention, as a kind of patronage.
Traditionally, it has been that the softer counterparties (Friendly countries, European allies, small island nations, etc) are staffed with patrons while the more difficult or geopolitically sensitive relationships are manned by professionals, but this is certainly not always true, and one can find many counterexamples.
some added context (both my parents are/were in the Foreign Service):
your location is assigned based on a competitive bidding system where you select from a list of cities to do your next tour. some countries/cities are obviously dangerous for a variety of reasons and they are called "hardship tours" (think iraq or afghanistan). you get bonus money for these and sometimes are forbidden from bringing family.
posts in places like Europe or East Asia are very desirable and highly competitive. but often it's a matter of fit. my dad was a hedge fund manager before the Foreign Service so his first posting was actually in Frankfurt. you can also do a tour in the continental US, such as in DC or NY. because of his economics background he has done a few of those.
most of the time the head ambassador is a political appointee, but the grunts are regular people who have made this their career.
> US 'diplomats' are campaigns big donors, or primary supports
To be clear, there are political and career diplomats, and each administration mixes and matches to its taste. (The current one veers strongly towards political appointees. That is to say, folks who raised money.)
This is how most foreign services are run, with maybe the exception of China.
>This is how most foreign services are run, with maybe the exception of China.
Absolutely not most. What country in Europe has a significant amount of ambassadors that are not career diplomats / government workers ?
In France, Germany, Switzerland you would either need to be a career diplomat/ foreign service worker or in rare cases you would be a career government employee assigned as diplomat to some specific country for some reason (i.e you were trade minister and become ambassador to your biggest trading partner).
The most "political" appointee ambassador in Europe I can think of is Mandelson but he is (as we found out) supremely connected to US power networks and he is still a lifetime politician/ government employee.
I know nothing about this but JumpCrisscross seems to use "political" to mean "has donated large sums of money" while your use of "political" is more like.. someone who does politics.
I think they're using it in a technical sense that's idiosyncratic to America: "career" members of the Foreign Service Corps, versus "political" appointees that can be directly appointed at higher ranks, but at the pleasure of the (in turn politically-appointed) secretary.
The first might have joined the Foreign Service and worked their way up; the second might have had a career elsewhere (not necessarily in political office), get invited to work for an administration, and then leave once there's a change in power.
> but at the pleasure of the (in turn politically-appointed) secretary
Parent is correct. The amount varies from administration to administration. But if you really want to be an ambassador, you're well positioned if you bundle a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars for the winning campaign. (There are traditionally limits. You can't usually buy your way into the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad or London. But for the postings with limited security implications, where the focus is on trade, you're mostly hosting expensive parties for your post.)
It is not. The vast majority of the world has a professionalized diplomatic corps roughly modeled on a Prussian or French system. As Fukuyama points out in Political Order and Political Decay the US is an odd case because it democratized before it developed an administrative state and as a result is somewhere between "Greece and Prussia" and ended up with a spoils-based and clientelist system, somewhat moderated by the Progressive era.
Is there any evidence of this being an actual pattern? I cannot speak for the rest of the americans, but I, personally, haven’t noticed it because it didn’t seem to be the case to me at all.
Asking because from my perception over the past 12 months, US ambassadors got more friendly and cordial with some countries (e.g., Japan[0]/Taiwan/South Korea[1]) and less cordial with others (e.g., certain european countries, like UK, that attempt to [imo unjustly] press american businesses that don’t even have any business presence within their jurisdiction).
That's Jared Kushner's dad. The one who went to prison for setting his brother-in-law up with a prostitute to break up his sister's marriage. I am sure he will approach this new mission with the same finesse he demonstrated in the previous ones.
How much do you have to donate exactly? I’m always surprised by how little it takes to bribe your way into government favor. I always think it must cost millions, then I hear it’s only like $100k or so. Sometimes even just $25k for local governments.
The sky’s the limit. The politicians are the ones who set the asking price, and it’s not just money. The cost is a function of how much they think they can squeeze you for discounted by how fervently you prostrate yourself to the throne.
It does reek of corruption, but it seems being ambassador to a close ally is basically getting several years of taxpayer-paid vacation in Europe. They're positions that have to be filled, and a career diplomat ending up in Sweden might even get bored because of the lack of anything to do.
It's not about trust, it's about economic power. Like the US threatened to cut off trade with countries that didn't adopt DMCA anticircumvention law, so every country has US DMCA anticircumvention law. They can try something similar with digital sovereignty. It might not work, because everyone is less afraid of getting cut off now.
This administration really, truly lives under the delusion that they hold "all the cards". In every engagement they think it is for them to dictate and everyone else to follow. Any graciousness they show is just kind benevolence.
And the "diplomats" of this administration is a rogues gallery of Epstein associates (e.g. pedophile sex-trafficking garbage) and self-dealing criminals. Just a who's-who of garbage.
They are sending their absolute worst.
Americans are just blissfully unaware how much their country is being destroyed. It's staggering stuff. Even if you're a super conservative, there should be utter embarrassment and outrage about how incompetent and clownish this parade of imbeciles is.
> don't think the memory of America as a bully will go away
It won't. But going digitally sovereign will cost Europe tens of billions of euros. If there is a friendly race on the other side of the Atlantic, that will not mean the memories go away. But the urgency of the initiative is certainly sapped.
Oh for sure, this administration is just a symptom that the US has become an idiocracy levered by a plutocracy. A poorly educated, easily manipulated populace.
Trump is just the result of this, and it isn't going to stop when he kicks it. It'll be the next populist nonsense. The world needs to move on from America.
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” - Trump
Just replace Mexico with America. There must be some Freudian issue going on with Trump here.
The super conservatives share this belief that the US holds all the cards. This is the idea of American exceptionalism. We're special, we're uniquely capable, we can do anything we want because everyone else has no choice but to engage with us. If Europe abandons us, that's a win because they're just a drain on us. International trade is screwing us, so wrecking it will usher in a new golden age.
atleast most senses of this exceptionalism have been fading away in europe thanks to the result of two world wars. (and many, many conflicts before that)
The US ambassador to France has just had his access to parliamentarians and members of the government withdrawn because he is trying to turn a neo-Nazi who died in a fight into a political martyr. There are similar situations in Belgium and Poland.
American diplomats have been doing Trump's dirty work for a some time.
I am more concerned about US interference in elections and campaigning for the far right than lobbying for data at the moment.
(He later doubled down on the decision to erase any mention of the racial segregation black US soldiers were submitted to while serving in the army during WWII.)
The US doesn't have diplomats anymore. Just Republican donors with no experience. Hell, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner's dad is a diplomat. A really bad one.
It's a "problem" in that it shows very clearly who runs the U.S. system. These are the people actually in charge without a meritocratic gloss to make it seem nicer.
I really don't envy the diplomats' job at the moment.