Trump's Zombie Ship of State
The Ship of State on the Rocks
Late last year, Vietnamese authorities encountered a "ghost ship" off their coast. The lights were still on. The crew was missing, leaving no personal effects behind. There was no evidence of violence or chaos. Though signs showed a Chinese origin, the home of the 164-ft. vessel is a mystery.
Sea lore is rich with documented tales of such phantom ships.
In 1931, the cargo steamer SS Baychimo became trapped in the pack-ice near Alaska, compelling the crew to abandon it. However, amazingly the vessel remained adrift for the next 38 years. She was sighted at various times between 1931 and 1969 in the Chukchi Sea off the northwestern Alaskan coast, on a spooky voyage to oblivion.
One of my favorites is the HMS Octavius, a trading ship that attempted to return to England from China via the treacherous Northwest Passage. In 1775, a whaling ship found it drifting aimlessly off the coast of Greenland. Upon boarding the ship, the whalers found all of its crew frozen dead by the Arctic cold. The ship’s captain was found sitting at his desk, with a logbook in front him, having finished an entry from 1762. The Octavius had been adrift for 13 years, manned by a crew of the dead.
A more recent case in the same vein is that of German yachtsman Manfred Fritz Bajorat. Last year, Filipino fishermen found his vessel adrift, its mast broken. Upon boarding, they found the mummified remains of Bajorat seated in the cabin, his hand reaching for the radio telephone as if he were making one last desperate bid to send a Mayday message. How long he had been dead remains unclear. He had been sailing since 2010. Before him was a letter he had composed to his late wife:
“Thirty years we’ve been together on the same path. Then the power of the demons was stronger than the will to live. You’re gone. May your soul find its peace. Your Manfred.”
No one can say how many ghost ships haunt the seven seas today, but it's safe to say they number in the scores. One very recent casualty of political storms is the U.S. Ship of State. Not a physical sea vessel, but rather the embodiment of our country's navigation through the perilous seas of diplomacy, the Department of State under the Trump administration has taken on the trappings of a modern ghost ship, an abandoned vessel, meandering aimlessly in the storms, swells and gales of a dangerous environment, its captain essentially mummified in place.
Perhaps zombie ship is a more apt description. With some 200 senior positions still vacant (61 of them ambassadorships), the senior crew of this vessel can best be described as skeletal. And with little guidance and nary any contact from above, they wander directionless -- yes, like zombies.
Lest I lose readers, I'll suspend for now further strained maritime and horror fiction metaphors.
Press reports describe a closed-off, insular seventh floor at the State Department, the eagle's nest of its leadership. A senior career Foreign Service officer told me the bureaus responsible for hands-on diplomacy "rarely hear from them and little in the way of policy papers travels either way." News reports describe an unusually busy cafeteria filled with semi-idle civil servants in extended luncheons and nursing their coffees due to lack of work -- except when the president tweets some nonsense setting off diplomatic explosions like the latest ones slamming Qatar for supporting terrorism; the C-in-C was totally unaware that the Gulf nation hosts a U.S. military base of 11,000 personnel who support the war against ISIS. Then it's all hands on deck to put out the latest blaze set by the boss.
My fellow blogger, Diplopundit recently wrote up an informative description of the small handful of political appointees who constitute Secretary Tillerson's praetorian guard. DP said:
"We understand that as secretary of state, his time is limited and that his staff has to prioritize who/what he sees but the reports coming out of Foggy Bottom appears to have less to do with a new staff learning to prioritize and more to do with control and trust. More of the former, and less of the latter. Even folks who were hopeful, even excited when the former Exxon CEO was appointed to Foggy Bottom, have since expressed dismay at how the newbie secretary of state is running the oldest executive agency in the country. If Secretary Tillerson is walled off from his workforce, and only gets his information through the filtered lens installed by his inner circle staffers, what kind of information do you think he’s going to get? Just the rosy ones (like everthing is A-OK) or they have pitchforks out for ya?"
Politico reports the leadership has "cut career staff out of decision-making in an attempt to combat the sort of leaks that have hobbled the White House — and have isolated Tillerson from some of the people who could help him succeed. It’s a setup that risks limiting his effectiveness." Politico cites one source saying that Policy Planning chief “Brian (Hook) doesn’t really trust any of the civil servants, so he tries to do it all himself” and that Chief of Staff Margaret Peterlin is "a militant about preventing leaks from within a department in which many employees resent Tillerson’s embrace of Trump’s budget proposal to cut State Department funding by nearly 30 percent."
To be fair, paranoids sometimes have reason to believe the world is out to get them. When President Trump issued his first abortive Muslim travel ban, some 1,000 State employees signed a dissent channel memo opposing it. And department insiders promptly leaked to Congress Trump's orders to draw up unilateral measures to immediately improve relations with Moscow, including lifting sanctions, asking nothing in return. And this week, the career FSO acting as charge d'affaires in Beijing abruptly resigned rather than deliver the administration's demarche on withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement. And there continue to be recurrent signs of restiveness in the career ranks.
No wonder a president known for his vindictiveness is hell-bent on shrinking the State Department to the size where he can drown it in a bathtub, to paraphrase that great forward-looking thinker of the radical right, Grover Norquist.
But those who've acted to undercut the administration's policies are not doing so out of vain or petty reasons. As a 30-year senior FSO told me, “Morale is not necessarily low because we fear for our jobs. It is low because we fear for our country. We see what can happen and it terrifies many of us. We are entering uncharted and rather scary territory. Trump’s policies fly in the face of norms that have been respected by Republican and Democratic administrations since World War II and before."
Not since the Nixon years have we seen a State Department with as little policy relevance and influence as this one. (Funny how many other similarities there are between that doomed president and this one. Comey hearings anyone?)
But a gutted diplomatic bureaucracy carries high risks for the country. "When my profession fails, yours has to come to the rescue," Tallyrand told Marshal Ney (the latter was subsequently executed in popular outrage against Napolean's warmongering).
And John F. Kennedy warned that "Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us."
Back to strained metaphors.
So, as the Ship of State languishes on the rocks with its zombie crew, more dangerous shoals lie ahead for the nation. Neither a deranged commander-in-chief nor an isolated and out-of-depth Secretary of State can give us confidence that we will make it through. Will SS America become the next ghost ship?
See also --
Fear and Loathing in Foggy Bottom