Most of us don’t think we are cut out to be doctors or engineers. Then why do so many of us believe we can be diplomats? Does one need training or a particular background to become a U.S. ambassador? I find myself asking these questions every time I hear about a failed non-career ambassador.
President Obama promised change in Washington, but he continued the decades-long tradition of dishing out ambassadorial posts to people whose only “qualifications” were their big donations to his election campaign. As I’ve written before, the American Academy of Diplomacy and the American Foreign Service Association have called him out on this disgraceful practice.
Many of those political appointees actually do a fine job. Although the two weeks of training they get at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute are grossly insufficient, they work hard to understand what it takes to handle the international relations of the United States, and what the daily conduct of diplomacy requires from them as civil servants.
But then there are those who think they already know what an ambassador should do and care little about tradition and bureaucracy. None of us admits to liking bureaucracy and we all express disdain for bureaucrats from time to time.
That’s exactly what Douglas W. Kmiec, the U.S. ambassador to Malta, did last week. He blasted a report by the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which criticized him for neglecting his overall duties and engaging in “outside activities [that] have detracted from his attention to core mission goals.”
Instead of focusing on broader foreign policy and national security issues, Kmiec has been spending most of his time promoting his Roman Catholic faith, mainly by writing various articles and speaking about religion, as well as issues such as abortion.
Following the OIG report, Kmiec offered Obama his resignation, vehemently rejecting the investigation’s findings. “I doubt very much whether one could ever spend too much time on this subject,” he wrote in a letter to the president.
Unwittingly, Kmiec hit the nail right on the head. No single issue, with the exception of very few vital national security matters, deserves the time and attention the ambassador has apparently spent on religion. He is certainly not the first political appointee to make one issue the sole emphasis of his tenure.
Previous ambassadors have dedicated themselves to very noble causes, including raising awareness about terrible deceases. A prime example is the focus on fighting cancer that marked Nancy Brinker’s stint as ambassador to Hungary at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration. While that was enormously helpful, many of Brinker’s subordinates and other State Department employees felt that other important issues suffered as a result.
Kmiec is a well-respected law professor and former legal adviser in the Reagan White House. I don’t know him, and I usually try to avoid criticizing people who are my father’s age for no good reason. But just because he has been successful in his field and donated a lot of money to Obama’s 2008 campaign doesn’t necessarily make him a good ambassador by default.
The U.S. Embassy in Malta, which I have visited, may be small, but it still has representatives of many federal agencies with sometimes competing interests and needs to be run by the ambassador in the best possible way. Supporters of appointing political ambassadors often laud their personal relationship with the president, but what good does that relationship do if it’s not put to an effective use?
Obama deserves credit despite his failure to end the longtime practice. He has just launched his re-election campaign and needs support from conservatives like Kmiec, so his resignation is an unnecessary distraction. However, Obama has not tried to defend Kmiec, who said he would leave his post in the summer.
One would hope that the president will think twice before rewarding campaign donors with embassies if he wins the 2012 election. Kmiec is not Obama’s first political ambassador to be embarrassed by an OIG report. As I wrote in February, Cynthia Stroum, ambassador to Luxembourg, was forced to resign because of her poor management style and serious damage done to her embassy.
Kmiec has said he was not pressured to resign and made the decision without outside intervention.
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President Obama is very smart and highly intelligent man who knew more about the world than most presidential candidates do before taking office. So why did he appoint a political ambassador whose tenure has been nothing short of a disgrace, just because she was a significant contributor to his election campaign?
There are some excellent political appointees, but Cynthia Stroum, ambassador to Luxembourg, wasn’t one of them. She was forced to resign last week, following a scathing report of her management style and the damage she did to her embassy by the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG).
I’ve covered the department for a decade and have rarely seen such a categorical, pointed and harsh document. Obama has every reason to be embarrassed.
“Most employees describe the ambassador as aggressive, bullying, hostile and intimidating, which has resulted in an extremely difficult, unhappy, and uncertain work environment,” the OIG report said after a two-month investigation last fall. “The bulk of the mission’s internal problems are linked to her leadership deficiencies, the most damaging of which is an abusive management style.”
Since Stroum assumed her post in December 2009, “most of the senior staff, including two deputy chiefs of mission (DCM) and two section chiefs, has either curtailed or volunteered for service in Kabul and Baghdad. Other U.S. staff members have also departed early,” the OIG said. “Of the seven permanent and temporary staff who served” as DCM, “only one has remained for longer than 6 months.”
Many ambassadors and their wives indulge in costly renovations of their residences, but Stroum apparently went too far. The OIG “believes that too many of the limited resources of this embassy have been allocated to issues related to her personal support,” the report said.
During a six-week period in 2010, an embassy employee spent 80 to 90 percent of his time searching for a temporary residence for Stroum. “In late summer, he and several other staff members, as well as the management officer, spent several days locating and purchasing an umbrella” for the ambassador’s new patio, it said.
Most career diplomats — and many others — think the practice of awarding campaign donors with ambassadorships, which began in the Kennedy administration, should be ended. The infamous WikiLeaks cables showed the general public how complex and intricate the work of U.S. diplomats is. Why do people think that anyone can do it? Would you let someone operate on you if they don’t have the necessary medical training?
In July 2009, I broke a story that the White House, unaware of historic norms, had been on track to give more than the usual 30 percent of ambassadorial posts to political appointees until objections from career diplomats forced it to reconsider. Overall, that number still holds, but according to a list of ambassadors maintained by the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), so far Obama has appointed 60 percent career and 40 percent political ambassadors.
Although campaign fund-raising is not a sufficient qualification for being a U.S. ambassador, there is a case to be made that political appointees are useful from time to time. I’ve met several good ones over the years, including Howard Baker, a former Republican senator and White House chief of staff under President Reagan, who was President George W. Bush’s ambassador to Japan.
Even Foreign Service officers say that they need an outsider’s point of view and a fresh perspective on things every once in a while. Someone with Baker’s political skills, stature and connections in Washington can actually be a huge asset to an embassy and the country where he serves.
On the other hand, Stroum wasn’t quite qualified for the job — even in tiny Luxembourg — but it seems the White House didn’t much care about that. She is by no means the only one. Bush’s ambassador to Trinidad and Tobago, Roy L. Austin, was the subject of two OIG reports. Before his appointment, Austin was a sociology professor at Pennsylvania State University — but his best achievement was that he befriended Bush when both studied at Yale University. He changed five DCMs during his tenure, but amazingly he survived all the eight years of the Bush administration.
So while I don’t expect political ambassadors to disappear, the White House should take their appointment much more seriously and consider their knowledge and skills before they start acting like kings and queens around the world.
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If anyone had any doubts that putting together the European Union’s new diplomatic service would be an utterly messy task, that is now an undisputed fact. A high-profile ambassadorial list released this week provoked publicly aired quarrels rather uncharacteristic of diplomats, and it raised questions about the future effectiveness of the EU corps.
The long-anticipated list, unveiled by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton in Brussels, was apparently based not on merit, but on what Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski called “esoteric considerations.”
What are those? A quick look at the list shows that the most important ambassadorships are going to diplomats from the oldest EU members in the West — China was given to the Germans, Japan to the Austrians and South Africa to the Dutch. What about less important but plush posts? Of those, the Spanish got Argentina and Singapore went to Luxembourg.
So the considerations Sikorski referred to had more to do with where the diplomats come from, rather than what they can accomplish in their respective positions. “Appointments should be made on merit,” he said. “We in the new member-countries have people who speak the languages of the former Soviet Union, we have expertise there.”
Four posts out of 29 went to diplomats from Central and Eastern Europe. Despite Sikorski’s protest, Poland did better than any other former communist country, winning South Korea and Jordan. The Bulgarians got Georgia, and Afghanistan had gone to the Lithuanians earlier.
“I have appointed the best people for the right jobs,” said Ashton, whose official title is EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, as well as vice president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive body. She was also criticized for choosing only eight women.
“We have made a start to address the important issues of geographical and gender balance,” Ashton said in an apparent admission that those problems are not yet resolved.
The nominees, who have to be approved by the European Parliament, may be the “best people” for the jobs from their country, but it’s questionable whether they are the best from any EU state. It’s not clear, either, that the top criteria during the selection process were actually skills, qualifications and experience.
“We are deeply disappointed,” said Slovenian Foreign Minister Samuel Zbogar. “We expected more transparent decisions and that geographic balance would be taken into account, in particular for those states, like Slovenia, which have no presence at all in the EU’s foreign institutions.”
Creating the European External Action Service — the diplomatic corps’ official name — is a daunting task, and Ashton has an impossible job. She won’t be able to please everyone even if she really wants to. But more consultation with Eastern European members would go a long way.
If there is hostility among diplomats from different countries even before the foreign service’s launch, which is expected in December, it will likely affect trust and their ability to work together at the dozens of missions they are setting up around the world.
Here is the full list released by Ashton’s office on Wednesday:
China — Markus Ederer (Germany)
Japan — Hans Dietmar Schweisgut (Austria)
South Africa — Roeland van de Geer (Netherlands)
Afghanistan — Vygaudas Usackas (Lithuania)
Albania — Ettore Sequi (Italy)
Argentina — Alfonso Diez Torres (Spain)
Macedonia — Peter Sorensen (Denmark)
Bangladesh — William Hanna (Ireland)
Jordan — Joanna Wronecka (Poland)
Uganda — Roberto Ridolfi (Italy)
Senegal — Dominique Dellicour (Belgium)
Angola — Javier Puyol Pinuela (Spain)
Botswana — Gerard McGovern (Ireland)
Burundi — Stephane de Loecker (Belgium)
South Korea — Tomasz Kozlowski (Poland)
Gabon — Cristina Martins Barreira (Portugal)
Georgia — Philip Dimitrov (Bulgaria)
Guinea-Bissau — Joaquin Gonzalez-Ducay (Spain)
Haiti — Lut Fabert-Goossens (Luxembourg)
Lebanon — Angelina Eichhorst (Netherlands)
Mozambique — Paul Malin (Ireland)
Namibia — Raúl Fuentes Milani (Spain)
Pakistan — Lars-Gunnar Wigemark (Sweden)
Philippines — Guy Ledoux (France)
Singapore — Marc Ungeheuer (Luxembourg)
Chad — Helene Cave (France)
Zambia — Gilles Hervio (France)
China (Deputy) — Carmen Cano de Lasala (Spain)
Papua New Guinea — Martin Dihm (Germany)
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Why is it that most major disputes between the United States and the European Union have to do with travel? First it was the war between Boeing and Airbus, then the furor over personal passenger data, and now it’s a new fee Washington is about to impose on visa-free travelers to the United States.
It was stunning to read a public statement by the EU’s top diplomat in Washington earlier this month that was anything but diplomatic and compared America to Alice’s Wonderland.
It seems the Europeans have had it. They can’t quite understand why Washington is so intent on making traveling to America more difficult for them year after year, coming up with one policy or requirement after another…
Thomas R. Pickering was a fresh college graduate in 1953 when he braved the notoriously lengthy entrance process at the State Department, prolonged even further by an ongoing investigation of suspected communists in the agency’s ranks.
Although he was offered a job earlier than he expected, Mr. Pickering by then had enrolled in the graduate program of Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass. He later left for Australia on a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Melbourne, which was followed by three years in the Navy.
So it was 1959 when the 28-year-old finally became a Foreign Service officer — or, to use the better-known term, a diplomat…
