America's Got Talent: Diplomacy as Amateur Talent Show In Trump World
I had the distinct honor of meeting Shirley Temple Black. It was summer 1989 at the office of my then boss, who was in charge of European affairs at the State Department. Ms. Temple was preparing to take up her position as U.S. ambassador in Prague. Of course, images of the Good Ship Lollipop danced in my head as I shook her hand and chatted. I grew up enjoying her films on TV, as did my parents at the cinema when they were kids. Shirley Temple was an American cultural icon. I found her to be charming and gracious.
But did I regard her as ambassadorial material? In a word, no, even though she had been ambassador to Ghana under President Ford and later chief of protocol. Temple was of a uniquely American caste - politically connected high society types who, with no background in diplomacy, are named ambassadors, usually because they bought the positions with large campaign donations or, as in the case of Temple, because of their star power. Like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm eyeing a box of juicy chocolates, Temple perused the available positions in superficial terms. She zoomed in on Prague and another small European capital, weighing her choice based on which of the two had the poshest ambassador's residence. My colleagues pulled their hair out. Here, we career diplomats spent most of our adulthoods learning foreign languages, cultures and the craft of diplomacy only to see utter dilettantes given the choice jobs for which we spent decades preparing. Temple did not even attend college. And Czechoslovakia at that time was on the brink of revolutionary change, soon to throw out its communist government.
Temple received positive reviews as a two-time ambassador from a fawning media. Foreign Service colleagues credited her for the positive image she conveyed of the U.S., but said the heavy diplomatic lifting was done by her career staff.
As I've written extensively over the years, presidents of both parties have used the State Department liberally as a patronage waste dump, taking diplomacy only semi-seriously, slam-dunking all manner of amateurs to head U.S. embassies, often referred to as the front line of our country's national security, as well as other senior diplomatic positions. And the ongoing reality show that is the Trump administration has taken things to a farcical level.
Last week, the White House announced that it had chosen as Middle East Envoy a 30-year old aide to Jared Kushner. Avi Berkowitz joined the 2016 Trump campaign fresh out of law school. He has no foreign policy experience. Former White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks is reported as saying his main duties under Kushner were "daily logistics like getting coffee and coordinating meetings." A Middle East expert described him as "a glorified intern." Others, as a "coffee boy." A former employer tweeted that Berkowitz was “not very impressive and needed significant hand-holding to handle even simple assignments." Berkowitz succeeds Jason Greenblatt, formerly Trump's real estate lawyer, also lacking any foreign policy credentials. Both are avowed Zionists, hardly a trust-builder with Palestinian counterparts.
Washington used to take negotiating a Middle East peace very seriously, assigning the nation's best talent to that vexing job, including veteran diplomat Philip Habib, former Senator George Mitchell and regional expert Dennis Ross.
Currently, 45 percent of Trump's ambassadors are non-career political appointees, the highest figure of amateur envoys since FDR (46 percent). In recent decades, that figure has averaged about a third.
Marquette University law professor Ryan Scoville, who published a study analyzing the qualifications of nearly 2,000 ambassador nominees from the Reagan era onward, says, "Trump's picks are less qualified than prior presidents'." He adds that Trump is continuing a downward trend in which "the level of qualification has eroded while the amount of contribution to candidates has risen."
Some low lights:
Doug Manchester, a San Diego real estate magnate, chosen to go to the Bahamas, gave $1 million to the inauguration. In his nomination hearing, he told senators the Bahamas was a U.S. protectorate.
Trump’s ambassador to Slovenia, Lynda Blanchard, is married to an Alabama real estate magnate. They have donated millions to Republican candidates in the last four years, including $553,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund. She posted on Facebook: "May God our Father paint this country Red with the Blood of Jesus!"
The position of ambassador to the United Arab Emirates is a sensitive post that all previous president have assigned to career Foreign Service officers. Trump’s nominee is John Rakolta, head of a large Michigan construction company. He donated $250,000 to the president's inauguration. He possesses zero foreign policy experience.
Trump’s ambassador to the UK, Robert "Woody" Johnson IV, owns New York Jets football team, and donated $1 million to the inaugural. Like Trump, Johnson has starred in a reality television show — about being the U.S. ambassador in London. He recently was criticized for defending U.S. companies that wash chicken with chlorine and inject beef with hormones — which the U.S. would market to post-Brexit Britain. He wrote in an editorial, the EU "prizes history and tradition over innovation and science."
George Glass, an Oregon real estate developer who donated over $100,000 to get Trump elected, is now ambassador to Portugal. Glass is an avid propagator of the QAnon conspiracy line about a “Deep State” attempting to destroy Trump’s presidency and a cabal of Satan-worshiping Democrats who run a child sex cult. Wonder how he gets along with his staff.
The TV soap opera series Bold and the Beautiful has produced some interesting talent to U.S. diplomacy. President Obama appointed Colleen Bell, wife of the show's producer and lacking any relevant credentials, to become ambassador to Hungary. Not to be out done, Trump named Carla Sands, a veteran actor of the show, and chiropractor to boot, as envoy to Denmark. Her character, Alex Simpson, "slept with Ridge before he was supposed to marry Caroline, Storm's ex-girlfriend." Her contributions toward Trump exceeded $350,000.
Trump's ambassador to the UN, until recently the top U.S. diplomat in Canada, Kelly Knight Craft, is the wife of a coal-mining executive who gave $1 million to the Trump campaign. Asked in an interview whether she believed in climate change, Craft responded, "I believe there are scientists on both sides that are accurate."
Trump’s pick to become ambassador to South Africa is former native of that country and handbag designer with no diplomatic experience, Lana Marks. She is the fourth Mar-a-Lago member Trump has picked for an ambassadorship. Marks has repeatedly been accused of not paying the people she does business with. Sound familiar? More than a dozen lawsuits have been filed against her in four states by former lawyers, landlords, security contractors, handbag customers, construction contractors and retailers, all of whom accuse her of fraud. While she has settled some of the lawsuits, she nonetheless was evicted from her offices for not paying her rent. It doesn’t end there. She and hubby were fined $360,641 by the IRS for failing to pay back taxes. Clearly a prime individual to represent the United States abroad.
The list of ne'er-do-wells goes on and on in perfect keeping with a scandal-stained administration adept at little else but corruption and rank incompetence.
I can't end this disquisition without special mention of our illustrious ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell. Soon after arriving in Berlin, he told Breitbart in an interview, "I absolutely want to empower other conservatives throughout Europe," prompting calls by German politicians for his expulsion (persona non grata in diplomatic parlance) for interfering in their country's internal politics. An opposition politician accused him of acting like "a high commissioner of an occupying power." One White House official told the WSJ that Grenell has“made more enemies than friends, both inside and outside of Germany.” He's known among Germans as "der kleine Trump."
In a recent essay, I wrote that in the Trump administration, "The U.S. Department of State is being hollowed out and marginalized... Expertise and professionalism are sneered upon. Process is rejected. We are only at the beginning stage of self-destruction under the Trump regime."
And we face well over a year more of it. What will remain and how many years will it take to restore American diplomacy?