Gutting the Diplomatlic Corps

Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.

Abigail Williams at NBC

The State Department declined to provide exact numbers. According to the American Foreign Service Association, around 2,000 U.S. diplomats have left the Foreign Service over the last year, either through layoffs or forced retirements, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, experience in crisis response and highly specialized language skills paid for by the U.S. government.

Their departure from a workforce that was estimated to be more than 13,000 in 2024 leaves the U.S. at a critical disadvantage, current and former State Department officials say, at a time when the nation is facing an escalating number of foreign policy crises.

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The leadership vacuum is large. The ambassadorship in Moldova is still vacant, along with more than half of ambassadorships around the globe, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where a worsening Ebola outbreak began. There is no ambassador to Ukraine, and seasoned diplomat Julie Davis, who has been leading the embassy in Kyiv while simultaneously serving as ambassador to Cyprus, is stepping down next month to join others in retirement.

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In the Middle East, where the U.S. continues to navigate a war with Iran and the fallout with regional allies, half of the U.S. missions, including four Persian Gulf countries, are without formal U.S. ambassadors. Pakistan and Qatar, where officials have taken on critical mediating roles in negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, are without ambassadors.

The absences contributed to the frantic effort to evacuate thousands of Americans who became stranded, and withdraw personnel when Iran began retaliating across the region in March, current and former diplomats say.

Not good pic.twitter.com/yvodGttLpV

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) June 4, 2026

Civil Rights and Black Churches

Jeff Diamant at Pew:

Though primarily places of worship, Black churches have long played prominent roles in African American communities, offering services such as job training programs and insurance cooperatives, and many of their pastors have advocated for racial equality. Today, around three-quarters of Black adults say predominantly Black churches have done either “a great deal” (29%) or “some” (48%) to help Black people move toward equality in the United States, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

That is lower than the share of Black adults crediting civil rights organizations a great deal or some (89%) but higher than the share who credit the federal government (55%), predominantly Black Muslim organizations such as the Nation of Islam (54%), or predominantly White churches (38%).

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Sermon topics are one way that Black congregations stand out from other congregations. Black Americans who attend Protestant churches where most attendees and leaders are Black are more likely to say they hear messages from the pulpit about certain topics – such as politics and race relations – than are Black Protestant churchgoers who attend churches that are multiracial or White or where another race is in the majority.

Also at Pew,  Besheer Mohamed:

Opposing racism is an essential religious issue for most Black believers. Among Protestants, 75% of those surveyed say opposing racism is essential to being Christian, as do 77% of Catholics. In addition, about eight-in-ten Black adults who identify with other Christian or non-Christian faiths say opposing racism is essential to their own religious identity. Of those who do not describe opposing racism as “essential,” most say it is “important.” Taken as a whole, religiously affiliated Black Americans are somewhat more likely to say belief in God is essential to their religious identity (84%) than to say this about attending religious services (39%), avoiding sex before marriage (30%), or opposing abortion (23%). Similar shares of religiously unaffiliated Black Americans (71%) say opposing racism is essential to their definition of what being a moral person means to them.

Bad Conversation Between Nixon and Reagan

Tim Naftali at The Atlantic:

The day after the United Nations voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China, then–California Governor Ronald Reagan phoned President Richard Nixon at the White House and vented his frustration at the delegates who had sided against the United States. “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said. “Yeah,” Nixon interjected. Reagan forged ahead with his complaint: “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Nixon gave a huge laugh.

Race Relations

From Pew:

Nearly a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, a majority of Americans (60%) say his election has led to worse race relations in the United States. Just 8% say Trump’s election has led to better race relations, while 30% say it has not made a difference.

Shortly after Trump’s victory last year, voters had less negative expectations for how his election would affect race relations. In November 2016, nearly half (46%) said it would lead to worse race relations, while 25% expected his election to lead to improved race relations (another 26% expected little change.

 Eugene Scott at WP: 

The Times reported that Trump had read a list revealing the number of immigrants that had entered the country:

Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.

Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.

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The Trump administration’s 2018 budget proposes cutting $800 million in America’s bilateral HIV/AIDS programs. And neither South Africa nor Nigeria would be in the “priority” category in the State Department's new AIDS strategy, despite together being home to about a quarter of the AIDS cases in the world.

Despite senior staff denying the president’s alleged comments, according to Huckabee Sanders, the president’s track record with immigrants, including those from Africa, leads some within the community to doubt that Trump’s vision of a great America includes them. Many members of America's immigrant communities have felt devalued by Trump since the day he announced his campaign for president. The policy proposals that followed — combined with comments about black Americans — have led many within the black and immigrant communities to believe that Trump has little to no respect for black people wanting to come to the U.S. to experience the American Dream.

International Outrage: PR and Short Attention Spans

Our chapters on interest groups and foreign policy note that foreign businesses and governments seek to influence opinion in the United States. The Hill reports:

The Nigerian government has signed a contract worth more than $1.2 million with a Washington public relations firm to deal with the fallout from the Boko Haram kidnappings, documents obtained by The Hill show.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, who is up for reelection in February, is seeking to counter the perception that he has not done enough to combat the Islamic extremists in his country who abducted more than 270 schoolgirls in April.

To that end, his government has hired Levick, a prominent PR and lobbying firm in Washington, to engage in an effort to change the “the international and local media narrative” surrounding Nigeria’s “efforts to find and safely return the girls abducted by the terrorist organization Boko Haram,” according to a contract document signed June 13.

The firm will also be “assisting the government’s efforts to mobilize international support in fighting Boko Haram as part of the greater war on terror.”

Levick is partnering on the contract with Jared Genser, a human rights attorney who primarily represents political prisoners.

Terence McCoy writes at The Washington Post:

From the outset, it was probably inevitable. What was once an international army of protesters that spanned both continents and the Twitterverse has dwindled.

Nearly three months have passed since Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls from a dormitory. Boko Haram is suspected of kidnapping approximately 60 more women and girls. And #Bringbackourgirls has, by nearly every measure, failed.

It’s not surprising. Internet activism has a finite life span. In a matter of days, it blinks into existence, then blinks into oblivion.

We've been there before.  Tom Jacobs writes at Pacific Standard:

Remember Kony 2012? A 30-minute video expose of a Ugandan warlord, it was one of the fastest spreading viral videos in history, with more than 100 million viewings in six days. Its success suggested that the Internet can be used to stir up public outrage to the point where governments will feel the need to take action.

Then, it all faded away.

Why that happened, and what the episode says about human nature, is the subject of a somewhat pessimistic new paper. It concludes that examining a tough issue in its full complexity dampens emotional involvement on the part of the public, which gets more aroused by black-and-white portrayals of clear-cut enemies.

War Powers and Chad

The president has sent this letter to the House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), president pro tem of the Senate:

Approximately 80 U.S. Armed Forces personnel have deployed to Chad as part of the U.S. efforts to locate and support the safe return of over 200 schoolgirls who are reported to have been kidnapped in Nigeria. These personnel will support the operation of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft for missions over northern Nigeria and the surrounding area. The force will remain in Chad until its support in resolving the kidnapping situation is no longer required.

This action has been directed in furtherance of U.S. national security and foreign policy interests, pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct U.S. foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive.

I am providing this report as part of my efforts to keep the Congress fully informed, consistent with the War Powers Resolution (Public Law 93-148). I appreciate the support of the Congress in these actions.

Kony

Social media are playing a role in international affairs. The New York Times reports:

Jason Russell said he never knew he was driving into a war zone. At 24, he had just graduated from the University of Southern California after studying film, he said, and was out looking for a story to tell.

Suddenly, he said, gunmen shot at the truck in front of him, and that is how he discovered the horrors wrought by Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. Mr. Russell would dedicate the next nine years of his life, often in obscurity, to making them a household name.

This week, in a testament to the explosive power of social media, he managed to do so in a matter of days, baffling diplomats, academics and Ugandans who have worked assiduously on the issue for decades without anything close to the blitz of attention that Mr. Russell and his tight-knit group of activists have generated.

Since being posted on Monday, their video, “KONY 2012,”has attracted more than 50 million views on YouTube and Vimeo, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations on the first day alone and rocketing across Twitter and Facebook at a pace rarely seen for any video, let alone a half-hour film about a distant conflict in central Africa.

The US government has noticed, as MSNBC reports:

The State Department on Thursday dismissed any suggestion that the United States might pull its advisers out of Uganda, a prospect raised by the “KONY 2012” video generating millions of views on the Internet.

That viral video details the atrocities carried out by Josephy Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, and is part of a marketing campaign by the advocacy group Invisible Children to raise awareness about the issue. The jungle militia leader is wanted for atrocities by the International Criminal Court and is being hunted by troops in four Central African countries. Last year, the U.S. sent nearly 100 Special Forces troops to Uganda to train military forces there in an attempt to stop Kony.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland on Thursday applauded the effort to “shine a light on the horrible atrocities of the LRA.”

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Inherit Your Rights

Our chapter on civic culture discusses voluntary service. Our chapter on foreign policy and national security explains various ways in which Americans have helped people in other countries.

Here's an example.

In 2010, Stanford Law School student Jana Hardy teamed with British attorney Kate Windridge to found Inherit Your Rights (IYR), a nonprofit dedicated to (1) educating women about their property rights and inheritance laws; (2) supporting widows in their immediate needs through micro-enterprise 
projects; and (3) assisting widows to assert, exercise, and defend their legal rights.

From the group's website:

Inherit Your Rights has initiated its pilot project in northern Tanzania, in a small village in the foothills of Mount Meru. Through a local Pastor, we have met and started working with a group of 35 widows. We have acquired a plot of land here, where we can operate micro-enterprise projects to assist the women with their immediate needs, and where we hope to open a legal-aid clinic, focusing on probate and property law.

In rural Tanzania, widows are extremely vulnerable to abuse: under customary law, when a man dies, his wife inherits nothing, unless she is childless and there are no other living relatives. The man’s children are his rightful heirs. However, if the children are too young to assert their rights, the man’s family often takes advantage of the situation, and expels the widow and her children from the family land. These women, alone and with no means of supporting themselves or their children, need both legal representation and practical assistance.

For more information, visit IYR’s website: www.inherityourrights.org