Once again, the Obama administration has put the lie to the
idea that they represent the end of politics as usual in Washington. And once
again, the self-inflicted wound comes courtesy of those wonderful folks at
White House personnel whose gaffes and misjudgments have produced many of the
most notable missteps of the otherwise successful first few months of the Obama
Era.
But their latest moves, the announcement yesterday of
a raft of diplomatic appointments, do more than remind us that the gap
between ideals and actions is Washington's version of the Grand Canyon. They
raise a larger question about the nature and practice of U.S. foreign policy: Do we even need ambassadors anymore?
Of course, if your impulse is to answer the question by
saying, "sure we do. If we didn't have ambassadors where would we send all the
campaign donors and political hangers-on for whom we couldn't find plum jobs in
Washington?" then you not only understand Washington but you understand where I
think Obama went wrong yesterday and why my question about the need for
ambassadors is genuinely open to question.
Now, not all of the administration's ambassadorial
appointments yesterday are open to criticism. Two exceptionally important jobs were given to excellent candidates. Tom Shannon, a gifted
career diplomat who most recently was the assistant secretary of state in
charge of the Americas is going to Brasilia where I suspect he will remain the
single most important official in the Administration dealing with Western
Hemisphere issues. Tim Roemer, the former Indiana congressman and 9/11
Commission member is headed to New Delhi where his closeness to the president,
his understanding of American politics and his smarts will help move the
U.S.-India relationship right to the top of those most important to us in the
world where it ought to be.
But some of the appointments suggest that whenever the new
ambassadors enter a room, they should be piped on deck with the ka-ching of a
cash register or at least a chorus or two of Abba's "Money, Money,
Money." Most notable among these is the decision to appoint a tech
lawyer named John Roos as the ambassador to Japan despite having little
experience in the region, no diplomatic background, and no political background
besides having raised over $500,000 for the president. To the face-conscious
Japanese, already reeling from their economic nightmare of the past decade and
China having supplanted them as America's top diplomatic priority in the
region, this has got to come as a blow...which is no way to start an
ambassadorial tenure. The message
is clear: U.S. political fund-raising matters more than mastery of the
diplomatic interchanges with the world's second largest economy and our primary
democratic ally in East Asia.
Similarly, to our number one ally in Europe, the UK, we send
Louis Susman, another big time fund-raiser whose credentials include having
been a vice chairman of financial invalid Citibank (who knew overseeing the
decline of an American financial institution would become the great path to top
government jobs that it has been in this administration?) and a director of the
St. Louis Cardinal's baseball team. To France, the decision is to send another
fund-raiser, this one whose most notable credential is having been the
President of the Muppets.
(He once ran the Jim Henson Company.)
Other campaign friends ended up with good posts such as
Vilma Martinez, an employment lawyer who once ran the Mexican-American legal
defense fund. That the Argentines will wince that we think somehow think one
size Latina fits all posts and that experience on Mexican-American issues will
translate into knowledge of how to deal with challenges in Buenos Aires will
soon become apparent. Revealingly,
beyond the Shannon appointment -- which itself came only after a long and
heated battle between the State Department and the White House about whether to
give the slot to a career foreign service officer or a political appointee -- the
three other career diplomats who were named to slots yesterday got assignments
in Iceland, Kosovo and Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
Of course, Obama is not the first to send unqualified fat
cats off to be America's face to the world (and there is a certain element of
truth-in-advertising there that is refreshing amid the finally buffed bullshit
of diplomatic intercourse). But this only underscores my core point. If a job
is meaningless enough to be entrusted to someone who is unqualified to do it,
do we really need to fill that post? This point is made especially forcefully
when even the most important such jobs (like Japan) are being filled by
political bag men. Further of course, anyone with much exposure to foreign
policy knows that to our closest allies and most important enemies, dealing
with ambassadors is often viewed as being at the bottom of the food chain. It
is too easy today to pick up the phone or send ministers to speak to cabinet
secretaries or sub-cabinet officials to meet with sub-cabinet officials or even
to arrange exchanges among leaders than to entrust really important communications
to intermediaries who need to pass it up through multiple layers in the State
Department and/or the White House before they reach the eyes of anyone who is
actually a policymaker. Furthermore, with the proliferation of special envoys
in this administration...diplomats who report directly to the Secretary of State
or the President...being a regular ambassador is rendered even more of a
bag-carrier or logistical coordinator role.
Once upon a time, we need diplomats because they served as
our primary means of confidential communications with other governments. They
played a vital role. They carried secret communications back and forth. Heck, they even had attaché cases named after
them. (And other things. Poinsettia plants, for example, are named after Joel
Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. Ambassador to Mexico.) But today, for the purposes of most really
important diplomatic exchanges there is almost always a better conduit than the
ambassador and for the ones that aren't that important, do we really need
someone in a special ceremonial post? Or someone who doesn't understand the
country or diplomacy? Unless of course,
our main objective is to raise money from these countries which, come to think
of it, could be a growing responsibility of U.S. ambassadors in the future and
could justify some of these recent Obama appointments.
For really important relationships, we need permanent
high-level representation. But those
relationships are comparatively few and in those cases, we need a special breed
of highly empowered, highly experienced people...people who look more like Tom
Shannon or perhaps Tim Roemer or Jon Huntsman...and not the others. A good rule of thumb might be: If you think a
job can go to someone with no regional, diplomatic or relevant national
security experience, then perhaps we ought to really be thinking about whether
we need the job rather than who should fill it.
JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images
Read More
(21)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE