As a news story this is pretty small time, but is a good example of when we need to ask tough questions to and about an administration we generally support. A batch of new ambassadors just went through confirmation in the U. S. Senate, and it appears that the Obama administration made a disastrous choice for U. S. Ambassador to Norway
Hop the cloud
The story linked above from Joshua Holland of Moyers and Company provides some good background and analysis.
The State Department is filled with veteran foreign service officers with years of experience in international relations. Most of them are products of elite universities, where they studied subjects like conflict resolution or international trade theory. Many are multilingual, and all have deep expertise on the political scenes of various countries.
Yet they routinely watch as deep-pocketed political donors with little or no foreign service experience are appointed to serve as America’s ambassadors overseas.
Apparently,
George Tsunis was a McCain supporter in 2008, but switched parties in 2009 and was an effective bundler for the Democratic Party in 2012:
After registering as a Democrat in November 2009, Tsunis raised at least $500,000 for Obama’s 2012 campaign, and donated $300,000 to Democratic super PACs and $75,800 to the Obama Victory Fund, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. According to state records, Tsunis and his wife, Olga, have given $115,000 to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s 2014 re-election campaign.
I have never worked for the State Department, but I have lived in a couple of other countries and watched ambassadors and embassies in action, so I offer some observations with a little bit of experience behind them.
1) An embassy staff needs to be made up of professionals with expertise in that country and with the areas of their work (e. g. agriculture, development, trade, economics, etc.). They should not be political appointees, because if they switched with every new administration or ambassador the daily work of an embassy would be severely disrupted.
2) An ambassador needs general expertise in the country and the leadership skills to run a complex organization, but also needs to be a good politician who supports the president's agenda in that region.
3) #'s 1 and 2 combined mean that elevating a person from the embassy staff to a vacant ambassador position is probably not a good idea.
So, where would you find a person with all of the necessary skills and expertise, who is willing to leave whatever they are doing now for an appointment as ambassador to Norway that would probably last for 2-3 years?
The whole idea of having ambassadors seems quite antiquated to me now. Is it time to separate the running of an embassy in a country from the conducting of diplomatic relations with that country? Does this solve any problems? Does it create new ones?