{"id":15,"date":"2026-05-26T16:13:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T16:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=15"},"modified":"2026-05-26T16:13:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T16:13:00","slug":"where-are-americas-ambassadors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=15","title":{"rendered":"Where Are America\u2019s Ambassadors?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The United States is fighting, in some form or another, with almost everyone. America\u2019s in a hot war with Iran and a cold war with China and Russia (even if President Trump hasn\u2019t figured that out). Trump has ignited various trade wars, and keeps talking up a possible conflict with Cuba. And just for good measure, the president seems still obsessed with grabbing Greenland, which would spark a confrontation with NATO, the most powerful and successful alliance in history\u2014and one supposedly led by Washington.<\/p>\n

Read more The Phrase I Texted My Kids 133 Times<\/a><\/p>\n

This might seem like a good time for some traditional diplomacy: deploying ambassadors to smooth ruffled feathers, assure friends and warn enemies of American resolve, and work out details on trade and other issues that require professional attention. The problem is that those ambassadors don\u2019t exist. As The Wall Street Journal<\/em> reported last week, the Trump administration has left more than 100 ambassadorships unfilled, including some to important U.S. allies.<\/p>\n

This is an unprecedented number of vacancies, even for a White House that has shown little interest in traditional diplomacy. (At the same point in Trump\u2019s first term, only 45 slots were unfilled, which was nonetheless a slower rate of nominations than those of his predecessors.) The American Foreign Service Association, the union that represents Foreign Service officers, told the Journal<\/em> that Trump \u201chas been slow to nominate ambassadors, and those he nominates can often be held up in an increasingly slow and logjammed Senate confirmation process.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, yes\u2014but that\u2019s a polite way of saying that Trump doesn\u2019t understand the importance of ambassadors, and that he prefers to hand out such posts to friends and cronies, who will face tougher-than-normal Senate fights. In his usual personalized and chaotic way, he appears to bestow these appointments not to serve U.S. diplomatic goals, but to reward loyalty and, perhaps, troll the American public and the international community.<\/p>\n

In fairness to Trump, every president reserves some ambassadorships for donors and pals; some of them end up doing fine work, and others should never have been allowed to represent the United States overseas. Typically, however, these political ambassadors are given a cushy job in a smaller or less strategically important nation. (Kari Lake, for example, is an extreme MAGA loyalist and a failed political candidate; she has been named the U.S. ambassador to Jamaica, a thoughtless slight to an American friend.) It\u2019s bad enough to do this to such nations, but as I wrote this past winter, Trump has placed utterly embarrassing and incompetent people in major embassies, including in Jerusalem and Paris.<\/p>\n

These appointments not only express Trump\u2019s seeming disdain for diplomacy but reflect his long-apparent distrust of experts in general and professional diplomats in particular. Administration officials see no problem here, and told the Journal<\/em> that \u201cTrump leans on trusted envoys to manage relations with multiple countries at a time, which they say offers the president a more efficient model for his chosen envoys to deliver on his foreign policy needs region-by-region,\u201d such as using Tom Barrack, Trump\u2019s ambassador to Turkey, to also serve as his envoy for Syria, and relying on friends and family members such as Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner as personal emissaries.<\/p>\n

The claim that this is a \u201cmore efficient model\u201d is laughable. Trying to mediate a war between Russia and Ukraine without having confirmed ambassadors in either Moscow or Kyiv is not \u201cefficient\u201d; it is foolish. Likewise, dual-hatting ambassadors does not give their activities a broader regional coherence: It simply clogs their bandwidth, cross-wires staffs, and snarls communications channels. For example, not only is the ambassador to India, Sergio Gor, now America\u2019s top diplomat to the world\u2019s largest democracy; he also has some sort of responsibility for Central Asia, a region of approximately 85 million people and five very different nations\u2014four of which still have no confirmed ambassador.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration has never, to steal a phrase often used by former British Parliament Speaker John Bercow, given a flying flamingo about efficiency. So what\u2019s behind all of these vacancies?<\/p>\n

Read more Americans Have Entered the Age of the Needle<\/a><\/p>\n

Trump likely has no real idea what ambassadors do, and apparently doesn\u2019t care to. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, however, is not a political neophyte, and he knows what diplomats do, even if the president does not. He recognizes that ambassadors are important in day-to-day diplomacy and that they can be crucial during a crisis, when a foreign government wants to know that it is interacting with someone who has the full authority to speak on behalf of the president of the United States.<\/p>\n

And yet, one of Rubio\u2019s first actions as secretary was to recall 30 ambassadors. The State Department described this as a routine move, but that\u2019s misleading: All ambassadors submit their resignation<\/em> at the beginning of a new administration, and then they remain at their post until they are asked to extend their tour or a new ambassador is sent to replace them. But they are not usually recalled<\/em>\u2014that is, brought home immediately and leaving the office vacant\u2014at the beginning of a new president\u2019s term, and Rubio\u2019s move suggested that some sort of political vetting was being applied to career diplomats.<\/p>\n

Trump may also be extrapolating from his first term, and especially his first impeachment, when people in the government blew the whistle on his attempts to blackmail Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden and his family. He may have subsequently concluded that professional civil servants and diplomats are his political enemies. Of course, the president has never shown an understanding of apolitical service to the United States; any number of matters, including his White House ballroom and his proposed fund for supposed victims of the Justice Department, suggest that Trump\u2019s conception of the U.S. government is that it is little different from a company that he owns, in which everyone works for him. And if they\u2019re not supporters, they\u2019re opponents.<\/p>\n

But maybe, in the end, Trump simply doesn\u2019t want anyone representing him whom he can\u2019t trust to keep his secrets and do his bidding, especially if what he wants is unethical or even possibly illegal (such as his chicanery with Ukraine in 2017). In the classic 1990 film Goodfellas, a New York hoodlum describes his boss, Paulie, as a guy who hated group conferences of any kind, because he \u201cdidn\u2019t want anybody hearing what he said, and he didn\u2019t want anybody listening to what he was being told.\u201d Instead, Paulie\u2019s trusted lieutenants move from person to person, talking with various would-be partners and supplicants, and then go back and whisper in Paulie\u2019s ear.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s approach to diplomacy may be that simple: If you want to communicate with the United States, you wait until someone the boss trusts comes to you. Otherwise, you don\u2019t waste your time talking with professional diplomats. As Reuters reported this week, foreign governments are bypassing embassies and instead \u201crewiring their diplomacy around a small circle of people with direct access to the president.\u201d Unfortunately, if you\u2019re a country such as Greece and you\u2019re stuck with Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.\u2019s ex-girlfriend, as the ambassador, you might not have many productive interactions with the American government for a while. But if you matter enough to Trump to get a visit from his son-in-law, then you know you\u2019re talking with Washington.<\/p>\n

The world will not come to a halt if the United States does not have an ambassador in every embassy. Some vacancies are normal, and the influence of U.S. ambassadors rises and recedes depending on the needs and views of each president. But Trump\u2019s various diplomatic failures, including his serial humiliations at the hands of the leaders of China and Russia, his backtracking on his trade wars, and his inability to gather allied support for operations in the Middle East, all suggest that this is no way to run the diplomacy of a superpower.<\/p>\n

Read more The Advice I Hope You\u2019ll Never Need<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Around the world, more than 100 of the country\u2019s ambassadorships are unfilled\u2014a sign of the Trump administration\u2019s opinions about the value of diplomacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ideas"],"yoast_head":"\nWhere Are America\u2019s Ambassadors? - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=15\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Where Are America\u2019s Ambassadors? - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Around the world, more than 100 of the country\u2019s ambassadorships are unfilled\u2014a sign of the Trump administration\u2019s opinions about the value of diplomacy.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=15\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-05-26T16:13:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=15#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=15\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"Where Are America\u2019s Ambassadors?\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-05-26T16:13:00+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=15\"},\"wordCount\":1367,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=15#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/05\\\/c36c9d6b0e177c46a23d313017cc4271.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Ideas\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=15#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=15\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=15\",\"name\":\"Where Are America\u2019s Ambassadors? 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