'The End of Diplomacy'

Vivian Salama in The Atlantic:

By mid-afternoon, the gray, windowless corridors of the Harry S. Truman Building, the headquarters of the State Department, feel less like the nerve center of the world’s most consequential foreign-policy institution and more like the catacombs for diplomacy. A disorienting and disheartening quiet has settled in, following last year’s sweeping cuts at State and its sister agency USAID. Today, decisions that once moved through interagency meetings, policy-planning staff, and regional bureaus now seem to drop, fully formed, from a small circle of advisers around President Trump. The traditional (and famously bureaucratic) step-by-step process has been replaced by after-the-fact briefings for the nation’s diplomatic corps, and even those are sporadic….

The State Department’s culture has long depended on the belief that expertise accumulates over time—that years spent in Ankara or Accra or Moscow or Beijing are valued in Washington and necessary experience for senior positions in Foggy Bottom. Now some career diplomats tell me their expertise can feel like a liability, proof of their association with a bureaucracy viewed by political appointees as part of the so-called deep state. Meetings are fewer; paper trails are thinner. Proximity to power trumps process. “No one seems to be in the loop on anything, from policy decisions to personnel,” a U.S. official in Asia told me. That includes relationships with allies, which have traditionally been routed through State but now are centered on Trump’s own personal communications with world leaders.