Who Inflicted More Damage to U.S. Diplomacy: Joe McCarthy or Donald Trump?
President Joe Biden’s team of veteran technocrats have their work cut out for them in restoring U.S. diplomacy after four years of Trump’s neglect, purges and policy-by-tweet. As they prepare to launch ambitious foreign policy initiatives, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan will need to rebuild a very damaged foreign policy apparatus, focusing on people, policy and process.
Not since the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunts in the 1950s has the State Department suffered such crippling damage, with consequent diminishment of America’s national security and standing in the world. It is hard to say yet who inflicted the most damage, McCarthy or Trump. Comparing the two is necessary in order to plot the road to recovery and, one hopes, gain lessons learned in order to avoid a similar catastrophe in the future.
Topping the alcohol-sodden senator’s hit list were career diplomats whom he derided as “un-American.” As a compliant Congress stood by, the best of the State Department’s China experts were fired for allegedly having “lost China” to Mao Zedong’s communist forces. Their real crime? Speaking truth to power in their honest reporting from the field.
One of McCarthy’s victims, Medal of Freedom-winning Foreign Service officer John Paton Davies, Jr. wrote, “The violence and subtlety of the purge and intimidation left the Foreign Service demoralized and intellectually cowed. With some doughty exceptions, it became a body of conformists…and many cautious mediocrities rose to the top of the Service.”
The ranks of the State Department’s East Asia experts were so depleted by McCarthy’s purges that by the time the Vietnam War heated up, there were few senior officials with relevant regional experience to moderate policy. As the late, brilliant diplomat-journalist John Franklin Campbell later noted, “McCarthyism had made honesty and brilliance akin to bureaucratic recklessness… A new generation of diplomats was taught the virtue of caution and conformity.” And it took decades before American diplomats shook off their collective PTSD from this period.
Following in the McCarthy tradition, President Trump and his secretaries of state similarly hollowed out and marginalized State. Trump sought to slash its budget by almost a third. More than 100 out of over 900 senior Foreign Service officers—including a number of minority and female career officers—were dismissed, forced out, or quit during Trump’s first year in office.
An autocratic system “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” Hannah Arendt wrote.
A thirdof senior positions at State at the end of Trump’s term were vacant. Over 90 percent of those filled were occupied by political hacks as were nearly half of ambassadorships. Applications for the Foreign Service Officer Test have plummeted. Senior diplomats were blackballed from desirable jobs. Many employees feared speaking out—to the press, to outsiders, even their friends. And many sought refuge in marginal positions, waiting for Hurricane Trump to blow itself out to sea. As during the McCarthy period, special “security teams” in one bureau investigated career staff for their “loyalty” to the president, with some Trump political appointees accusingthem of disloyalty and being “traitors.”
“Pompeo will have all but completed the politicization of the State Department, arguably bringing it to its lowest point since the 1950s. The damage may be generational,” wroteex-senior advisor to Secretary Pompeo and 40-year Foreign Service veteran Michael McKinley in The Atlantic. A recent Senate staff reportstates that “a crisis in morale and lack of faith in leadership at the Department has increased to staggering levels.”
This dismal mood was reflected in remarks to me by current State employees. A mid-level Foreign Service officer told me that he and many of his colleagues seriously pondered quitting if Trump had won a second term, adding, “The organization feels gutted and has been very demoralized.” Another said, “Those of us who have held on are demoralized, and simply a change of administration is not enough to reverse the damage.” As for the arrival of the Biden-Blinken team, a former ambassador working at the department described the mood as “Joy and great optimism to setting the ship right and getting back to real diplomacy.”
Reconstructing the State Department should be a top priority for the Biden team because foreign policy cannot be carried out effectively with a severely damaged organization. On the personnel side, Secretary Blinken will need to fill the long vacant senior positions, not to mention those top positions that were occupied by Trump’s political appointees, as quickly as possible. For these positions as well as ambassadorships, the more that are filled by qualified career veterans – people with decades of diplomatic experience who can hit the ground running—the faster and more effectively will the new administration’s policies be implemented.
Under Trump, the policy formulation process went out the window. “Principals” and “Deputies” meetings of top administration officials to vet policy proposals were abandoned as was a serious National Security Strategy document laying out a road map for U.S. policy. All were replaced by the president’s tweets and off-the-cuff public remarks. The latest example was Trump’s peremptory recognition of Morocco’s sovereignty over the Western Sahara. “Nobody in headquarters knew this was coming,” one diplomat told me.
As President Biden and his foreign policy chiefs survey the wreckage left by the “deep state”-obsessed Trump administration and plan for rebuilding institutions and the policy process, they would be wise to recall lessons learned from the McCarthy period and devise ways to prevent a recurrence of the near-destruction of our diplomacy wrought by two malignant politicians.