Diplomatic posts shrivel under undiplomatic president

In an interview on Fox News, which does for President Donald Trump what ANN7 does for President Jacob Zuma, Trump defended his tardiness in making political appointments at the US state department, where some 70 top positions remain vacant.

These include the assistant secretary of state for Africa and ambassador to SA. The US president is not convinced all of them need filling. As for the department’s career officers, “we have some people I’m not happy with their thinking process”. Then, illustrating why those people might not be thrilled with his “thinking process” either, he went full l’état c’est moi: “Let me tell you, the one that matters is me. I’m the only one that matters, because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be. You’ve seen that strongly.”

Unsurprisingly, the department is haemorrhaging talent. Its leadership ranks are being “depleted at a dizzying speed”, Barbara Stephenson, a former ambassador, writes in the Foreign Service Journal. By her count, 60% of officials of ambassadorial rank have quit since the start of 2017.

This does not bother Trump. He wants to slim the foreign service drastically. When Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded the US downsize its official presence in Russia by 775 last July, Trump thanked him, only half in jest.

Rex Tillerson, his secretary of state, may not deny calling the president a moron but is on board with at least this part of his programme. Tillerson reportedly aims to cut 2,000 of the department’s 25,000 full-time positions. Does he have a point? Audits by the state department’s inspectorgeneral should give pause to any business executive conscious of the bottom line — and Tillerson was certainly one of those as ExxonMobil’s CEO.

The most recent available report on the US embassy and consulate in SA dates to 2011. The ambassador at that point was Donald Gips, among the very best. But was the gargantuan complement of 954 staff, comprising 357 US government employees seconded from the US and 597 local hires, really necessary to advance US interests?

The inspector-general himself wondered whether it was really necessary to have, in addition to press relations officers in every embassy on the continent, a parallel Africa media relations hub based in SA, giving rise to turf wars and bruised egos.

Did the US taxpayer get value from the 1,020 embassy employees in Nigeria as of February 2013? Or the 1,304 in Kenya as of August 2012? Or the 92 in Swaziland (June 2010) now housed in a new $182m terrorist-proof embassy?

For comparison’s sake, the British embassy in Washington is Her Majesty’s largest. It gets by, according to the latest diplomatic list, with 100 seconded officials. Putin manages with 126. Admittedly, these numbers do not include local hires and trade and consular offices outside Washington, DC.

But we are talking here about representation in what is still the first among major powers, not in a picayune nation of 55-million. SA, for what it’s worth, gets by in Washington with 50 seconded and local staff.

Trump, solidly in the tradition of populist American demagoguery, loathes the state department and the “pointyheaded intellectuals” of the foreign policy establishment because they read and think and have experience and hold him in deserved contempt.

Tillerson, on the other hand, seems rationally keen to debloat the state department and its ancillaries, such as the US Agency for International Development, deflate their vanities and make them altogether more fit for purpose.

Unlike Trump, he is not driven by the demon insecurity or a craving for revenge upon his betters.