Off the chopping block

President Donald Trump’s latest proposal to eviscerate the State Department’s budget may already be dead on arrival in Congress. It’s nonetheless a reminder of how the administration’s failure to take diplomacy seriously is undermining its own strategic goals.

The White House has delivered a foreign-affairs budget that amounts to diplomatic disarmament. It calls for a 29 percent cut to U.S. diplomatic and foreign aid spending next year — the most to any federal department. Among its ill-considered targets are democracy promotion, peacekeeping, and the fight against disease and climate change. Even worse, the Office of Management and Budget pegs the department’s outlays in 2023 as only 58 percent of this year’s.

Such cleaver cuts may mostly be an empty love letter to Trump’s base, but the administration has already done lasting damage to U.S. diplomacy. More than one-third of the State Department’s 150 positions requiring Senate confirmation remain empty. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s controversial restructuring of the State Department has driven away some of America’s best and brightest young officers.

The return of greater geopolitical competition is real and demands a smart, cost-effective approach. And the fact is, both in terms of personnel and spending as a percentage of federal outlays, the State Department at the end of the Barack Obama years was at historic highs. But lopping off nearly 30 percent of foreign-affairs spending in one blow makes no sense — especially if you think the world is so dangerous that defense spending must increase by 13 percent.