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Archive of "Embassy/State" Category
New Values-Based Recruiting for State Department
Andrew Crapuchettes is a man with a mission. He wants to bring patriotic values to government employment recruiting, and, he wants to personally help implement Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s mandate to reform the Department of State to better represent those values abroad long past the end of the Trump/Vance/Rubio administrations. Can he do it?
Crapuchettes earlier this spring received an almost one million dollar contract to act as a recruiter for the Department of State for new Foreign Service Officers (FSOs). He intends to implement this contract for finding America’s next generation of diplomats via his existing employment search websites, RedBalloon and Military Hire. When he talks about values-based recruiting, Crapuchettes pulls no punches about what his intention for State is, saying a lot of State’s “recruiting was focused on DEI. It was focused on trying to get in the guy with a PhD in black dance, rather than people who can actually do a good job.” He promises future recruits that “all of a sudden you’re in a position where you can have a huge influence for the rest of your life on the U.S. government.” He even sat for an interview with podcast CrossPolitic titled “Could 1,000 Employees Change the State Department Forever?”
The promised changes are in line with broader directives from President Trump and Secretary Rubio. In March 2025 Trump signed a memorandum directing the Secretary of State to remove “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility” (DEIA) as a Core Precept that under Biden controlled Foreign Service promotions. Supervisors under Biden were required to list specific DEIA accomplishments for each diplomat on his yearly job evaluation. The Trump memo further directed State not base Foreign Service recruitment and hiring on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, nor embed discriminatory equity ideology within any element of the Foreign Service. Rubio was quick to act, firing some 1,300 State Department employees, including 246 Foreign Service Officers, and recalling many then-ambassadors seen as opposed to Trump’s foreign policy. Rubio wrote about the restructuring that “motivated and creative State Department employees see their ideas watered down by turf battles until they give up… While the talented and loyal are driven into indifference. Radical ideologues and bureaucratic infighters have learned to play on this exhaustion to push through their own agendas that are often at odds with those of the president and undermine the interests of the United States.”
Some of the first concrete steps to dismantle DEIA and chip away at State’s culture Rubio took after the initial firings already concerned recruitment; new officers offer a faster way to reshape institutional culture than attempting to change the outlook of an entrenched workforce. Rubio suspended the Charles Rangel and Thomas Pickering Fellowships. Both existed to provide an alternative pathway into the Foreign Service with benefits not available through the standard hiring process, with a focus on increasing representation of underrepresented groups. The programs were administered through Howard University, a historically black institution, and the recruited Fellows were estimated to be 80 percent black, multi-racial or Hispanic. Rubio also did away with diplomats in residence (DIR), a program designed to reach populations with lower percentages in the Foreign Service than their share of the general population. Many DIRs were based at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Today, almost everyone who enters State as an FSO must now pass the same rigorous vetting, leveling the playing racial field.
A look at Crapuchettes’ current job employment websites at RedBalloon and Military Hire offers some clues to how State’s FSO recruitment may work in the near future. The sites advise all employers must pledge to honor free speech and medical privacy, something that may challenge State with its complex restrictions on FSOs appearing on TV and even in social media. RedBalloon itself states it seeks “motivated job seekers who value freedom, hard work, and merit-based recognition, and employers that respect their constitutional rights and provide a positive workplace where merit and achievement are honored.” MilitaryHire is much the same, but leans more heavily toward matching former military members with technical skills with businesses working alongside government. Crapuchettes is unabashedly Christian (this is of course what the MSM seized upon).
Browsing Crapuchettes’ employment sites shows they currently recruit for ICE and the Border Patrol. Some advertisements seek people who have or who will qualify for security clearances to work at Northern Virginia locations such as McLean, which may or may not be affiliated with the Intelligence Community or its network of contractors. One such ad is looking for people with proven lockpicking skills. Most other employers in the Washington, DC area appear to be well-known conservative or right-of-center groups and NGOs.
It is clear, in line with Rubio’s other changes, the change in recruiting venue is part of an all-out effort to radically change the culture of the State Department. Its last radical change, actually more of a lateral move, was during the Obama and Biden eras, especially under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Democrats expanded the traditional conception of diplomacy to include advocacy on LGBT rights, women’s rights, labor issues, and other social justice policy priorities. Critics argued recruitment favored applicants from elite universities and applicants who shared prevailing progressive assumptions within the foreign policy establishment. It is consistent with this former pseudo-ideological strategy that the new recruitment emphasis fits with the Trump administration’s own approach to foreign affairs.
Trump in his first term talked a good game about State Department reform, but he chose weak Secretaries of State who never understood they needed to affect change at all levels to alter State’s broader culture. The rank and file in an almost feral way understood this and stymied initiatives, slow-walked paper, and resisted initiatives until the changemakers ran out of time and likely interest. State successfully waited out its opponents in the first Trump administration because it did not believe it represents the Executive or even an America which it did not support politically. State instead had its own version of what the world really needs.
Things may be different now, as a growing cohort of conservative thinkers that will outlast Trump has come out of the closet inside State for the first time. Rubio’s changes reach into the hereto untouched recruitment, training, and promotion processes, the systems that shape institutional culture over the long run. Whether these reforms endure past the next Republican president is the central question. Personnel policies can be quickly reversed by future administrations. Rubio appears to be betting that changing who enters the Foreign Service will prove more durable than changing those already inside it.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Has Trump Helped Curb Illegal Immigration?
No one knows how many illegal immigrants (a catch-all term here for false asylees, visa overstays, border sneaks, the general undocumented, and the like) are in the United States, but various studies suggest it is a large number, maybe 18.6 million people, close to 6 percent of the entire population of the United States. For many years we had no mechanisms to count them, and in many instances the government did not really want to know. For example, despite issuing as many as 11 million visas a year, the State Department has avoided any comprehensive analysis on how many people overstay or misuse their visas as feedback to guide future decisions, claiming in a bureaucratic tussle the task belongs to DHS and isn’t any of their business. Even rudimentary immigration exit controls at airports, near standard world-wide, have only recently been deployed in the U.S. by DHS.
So any measurement of Trump’s attempts to lower illegal immigration begin with current, not historical, numbers. The U.S. Border Patrol recorded about 237,000 migrant “encounters” at the southern border in FY 2025, down from more than 1.5 million in FY 2024 and more than two million annually during the Biden peak years of 2022–2023. ICE reached a milestone this year of more than 10,000 foreign gang members arrested, many at the border. There are now more Border Patrol agents than any other time in the Patrol’s 102-year history. At the same time, Trump did away with the CBP One app which allowed would-be asylum seekers to begin the process by smart phone app even before they reached U.S. soil. Trump also restricted asylum processing and toughened standards against widespread fraud, even seeking to punish an American immigration attorney who (allegedly) filed false asylum applications, a rare Federal action.
Trump expanded expedited deportations and removals, reinstated tougher ICE deterrence policies and arrests, and made changes to the State Department visa-issuing system abroad to include new and higher fees and bond deposits, fewer visa posts issuing visas at all in fraud-plagued Africa, and stopped immigrant and non-immigrant visa issuance entirely in countries that do not cooperate with the U.S. on deportations and fraud prevention.
ICE arrests rose from a long-term average of roughly 350 per day to as many as 1,300 per day, increasing more than three times compared with the final year of the Biden administration. Deportations from within the United States increased by roughly 4.6 times during the first nine months of Trump’s second term. The use of third countries to accept deportees when their home country refuses to do so has increased significantly, with a new office at the State Department set up just to handle the details. Efforts to get illegals to self-deport have yielded almost 90,000 voluntary departures. ICE detention populations increased substantially, reaching nearly 70,000 detainees at one point, compared with roughly 39,000 when Trump returned to office. Congress also approved tens of billions of dollars for immigration enforcement and detention operations through 2029. Trump toughened up the civics test immigrants must pass in order to become citizens. The Justice Department launched legal challenges in states which allow illegal alien college students to pay the tuition rate reserved for legal in-state residents. Trump deincentivized working illegally in the United States while at the same time cutting into money laundering by Mexican and other drug cartels with a 3.5 percent remittance fee on the often untaxed money sent by aliens in the U.S. to their home country.
The administration’s changes were reinforced by two recent Supreme Court victories which allow Trump to regain substantial authority managing the border. In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado the Court ruled an undocumented person must be physically present in the United States to make an asylum claim. Asylum seekers who are stopped on the other side of the border (i.e., in Mexico, not actually admitted to America) are not “present” in the United States. If treated as inside the country as under Biden, despite being outside it, these individuals would be allowed to enter the U.S. and remain for years, with work permits, while their asylum claims pended. The eventual formal asylum approval rate was as low as 15 percent, even under Obama and Biden judges, and many asylum seekers simply disappeared into the United States as permanent illegals rather than face refusal and deportation. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found the immigration court system does not systematically track hearing attendance anyway, making it impossible to produce a real “no-show rate.”
The Supreme Court also gave DHS a powerful new tool in Mullin v. Doe, upholding the right of the administration to remove Temporary Protection Status (TPS) from more than 356,000 Syrians and Haitians now in the U.S. Congress created TPS in 1990 to allow temporary legal status and work authorization to nationals of countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters, or other transient conditions that make safe return impossible. With TPS, Congress intended the emphasis to be on “temporary.” The alien would not be expected to return home in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake, but was expected to return home as soon as possible. TPS as created by Congress never provided a path to permanent residency or citizenship. Yet hundreds of thousands of aliens stayed in the U.S. indefinitely under TPS, often vying for other immigration statuses like asylum when available. Many Haitians affected by the new Supreme Court ruling have been in the U.S. in “temporary” status since 2010, many Syrians since 2012. What was once intended as a temporary humanitarian gesture had been hacked into a new de facto permanent immigration status. The new Court ruling allows TPS to return to its original function. Elsewhere, Trump also seeks to end TPS for people, some 1.3 million of them, from 13 out of 17 countries holding the designation when Joe Biden left office. One TPS designation, for Somalis, has been in place for 35 years.
At the same time, Trump deportations, arrests, and detentions do continue to face significant legal and political constraints. This shows how deeply entrenched illegal immigration is in our society, and how easily it can be made into an emotional and political football. The article you are reading now, with its statistics about ICE enforcement growing, might be seen by The Atlantic as a call to arms against fascism. At The American Conservative, many of the same government actions are likely to get a nod of approval. Progressives are driven by the immigration myth that because their great, great grandpa immigrated to the U.S. from some eastern European shtetl that America is obligated forever to allow near-unfettered immigration. Others believe it is the right of any person living under less-than-ideal circumstances anywhere in the world to “have a better life” in the U.S., ignoring that every other nation instead tries to vigorously control its borders and interior with metered immigration.
Lastly, so much of the opposition to Trump’s immigration changes is simplistic Trump hatred. Reasonable Trader Joe-type suburban people are willing to suck tear gas and engage in street fights with armed Federal law enforcement over points of immigration law they had not heard of a few years ago. One resistor was just sentenced to 100 years in jail for trying to murder an officer in the midst of an armed assault on an ICE facility. The mayor of New York, unaware apparently of the importance of the Rule of Law in America, vows to not enforce a recent Supreme Court decision ruling because he feels it is anti-immigrant. These people’s apparent willingness to risk death or imprisonment over the fate of illegal aliens they do not even know is irrational. What they see as authoritarianism is simply the enforcement for the first time of laws on the books for decades. They don’t see immigration change in terms of something that might possibly help America, only in some schadenfreudian calculus that makes it seem Trump is losing a battle against them. Their way of thinking blocks any sensible discussion of immigration, one that ultimately could result in reforms to the law. Policies that might once have been debated on their merits are now interpreted almost exclusively through the lens of “resistance.” It is all America’s loss as chaos replaces democracy in the streets.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Do You Get It Yet? The State Department Rarely Matters Anymore
Has the State Department gotten the message yet?
Let’s try it by example. You meet a woman at a party. Even while you’ve telling her about your accomplishments she’s looking around the room. She reluctantly gives you her number before disappearing into the crowd. You text her 25 times telling her what a good romantic partner you are and after the first polite non-answers she stops responding. Is your next move to inform her further how essential you are to her life?
If you’re the U.S. Department of State being essentially declared irrelevant by the Trump administration, for the second time no less, you definitely go for it. You plan a rally with only Democratic Congressmembers a year after 1,350 employees were RIFed to declare the “cost is almost impossible to ignore.” You don’t offer any specifics about what that cost is besides “um, diplomacy is good.” You plant media puff pieces headlined “State is looking to rebuild,” and whining that instead of rehiring the RIFed old timers the organization is looking for new blood among former military specifically because they are not like you. You get MSNBC to write an article worrying about a leadership vacuum abroad as ambassador jobs are left unfilled, and then you cite off-the-grid Moldova, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Cyprus as critical examples, even when your own career Foreign Service people are left in charge (chargé d’affaires) but deemed inadequate to the jobs by your own words. You get pieces published about how State cannot respond to the Ebola crisis, without any details of what State might actually have to do with responding to a medical crisis that the UN or others are not already doing. You fill your yearly evaluations with talk about process, what you do, like writing papers and coordinating committees and delivering “strong” messages, without a word about outcomes, what you have actually achieved. And then you complain about new evaluations that require employees to be rated on a numerical scale and for supervisors to provide concise answers to written questions about performance to make the evaluations more data driven and less clubby and inside-baseball.
State can’t cite specifics and won’t embrace change. No one in the Trump administration is even listening, but you don’t get it.
Donald Trump appointed a strong Secretary of State, one who has the chance to be the next president and your next boss’ boss, and you miss the significance that he holds multiple important jobs in the administration, you’re just part of his day. A State Department that mattered would not be able to get by with a part-time secretary. You miss that he has created an exoskeleton of chosen advisors around himself, ignoring the bulk of State. The Financial Times writes “18 months into Trump’s second term the Department is not just sidelined; it appears under siege.”
You don’t seem to notice no one outside the Beltway really cares that a large number of embassies abroad have no ambassador (the administration has demonstrated through its actions that ambassadorial vacancies are a far lower priority than previously believed) and that many that do feature political appointees as personal mockery like former athlete Herschel Walker to conduct “diplomacy.” You miss that visa offices you used to run are being closed across Africa. You miss that a influential organization arose dedicated specifically to changing your internal culture (no such group exists to do the same for any other cabinet agency). You fail to see the impact of articles like those headlined “While America fights a war, the State Department is focused on dress codes.” It’s not a laugh line; it’s proof no one cares what you have to do with wars (and which State Department office is in charge of negotiating with Iran? Trick question, none, America’s most important diplomatic task is being done by appointed Special Envoys, as are Ukraine issues). After helping bungle the evacuation of Americans out of Afghanistan, you complain you weren’t given a big enough roll in evacuations prior to the current Iran War.
Why does the Trump administration ghost the State Department? A lot may go back to how State behaved during the first Trump Administration. State basically ignored his first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, slow-walking any changes he proposed. In a leaked dissent memo, Foggy Bottom even claimed their boss violated a child soldier conscription law. The State Department legal office prepared another memo for Tillerson warning of the dangers of leaking by State Department employees, which was then promptly leaked to the Washington Post. State also opposed Trump’s next Secretary, Mike Pompeo, until he walled himself off from the institution. One expert said “Pompeo followed the model of most of his predecessors, whether Democrat or Republican, of ‘doing my thing and letting the department do its thing.”’
State personnel took a lead role in the Trump impeachment hearings over Ukraine. Vanity Fair summed it up better than the FSOs leaking across social media: “A hero is born as Ambassador Masha Yovanovitch gives voice to widespread rage at State. ‘I think people are feeling huge pride in Masha,’ says a former ambassador.”
Alongside Yovanovitch, bureaucrat George Kent issued pronouncements against Trump people he never met who ignored his advice. Ambassador Bill Taylor leaked hoarded text messages with Trump political appointees. Taylor’s deputy, David Holmes, appeared deus ex machina in front of the impeachment hearing to claim he somehow overheard both sides of a phone conversation between Trump and his political appointee ambassador. Holmes surreptitiously eavesdropped on a presidential call and dumped it in the Democrats’ lap as red meat. White Houses, Republican or Democrat, cannot function when career officials routinely leak internal deliberations. And nobody likes a snitch.
State’s Foreign Service Officers saw themselves as resistance superheroes who would take down Trump I. The organization flirted with the role even before the election; a 2016 “dissent” was designed to force the then anti-war Trump into conflict in Syria. Then another leaked “dissent” by over 900 State employees strayed close to insubordination opposing Trump’s so-called “Muslim Ban.” State was forced to settle with conservative media outlets that sued for censorship by the Department during the Biden administration. That court decree actually mandated training for State employees on their First Amendment obligations to all of the Americans they are supposed to be serving, despite those employees having already sworn allegiance to the Constitution which includes the First Amendment. Earlier, everyone remembers the Department’s delaying the release of Hillary Clinton’s emails (after helping hide the existence of her private server). The State Department turned a blind eye for years to Secretary Clinton’s nepotism hiring her campaign aide as a make-work State employee. State’s DEI programs, which grew under the Obama and Biden administrations, were declared discriminatory. Maybe the organization is deemed irrelevant by Trump in part because it has betrayed itself to partisan politics.
Institutions survive only if political leaders believe they advance elected policy rather than resist it. Too many of State’s employees exist in an adverbial relationship to the Executive, and are proud of themselves for it. No other Cabinet agency comes even close to that. The State Department’s challenge is not rebuilding its workforce, it is rebuilding the confidence of the elected government it exists to serve.
Of course there will always be some role for the State Department overseas at least, primarily in assistance to American citizens and the few traditional diplomats needed to handle the bureaucratic concierge work and VIP logistics handling State has always been good at. But we are questioning most of the rest. Being left functionally irrelevant is no fun. But it hurts even more when you slowly learn it was in large part your own fault. Face it, if you were Donald Trump, would you trust the State Department?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
State to Save Millions Closing Visa Offices Across Africa
Marco Rubio’s State Department will slash the number of U.S. offices in Africa processing visas for foreigners seeking to come to the United States. The almost 50 U.S. embassies and consulates that are currently processing visa applications will be reduced to 20 to take advantage of economies of scale. This will save taxpayer dollars maintaining offices and staff that mostly just refuse visas anyway, as well as likely slow the number of Africans who secure visas only to overstay in America. Donald Trump haters will call this racism. Supporters will call it saving taxpayer money.
The United States currently issues and refuses both immigrant and nonimmigrant visas at some 50 posts across Africa (out of 54 countries there.) Immigrant visas (IVs), also known as green cards, represent a relatively small amount of the business. The way immigrant visas are typically refused in Africa (officially called 221g) multiple times before finally being issued, sometimes years after the process started (as if your “Incomplete” in sophomore English Composition was still hanging over you years after graduation), the refusal rates appear artificially high and make for bad statistical comparisons. Also, the Donald Trump administration in January 2026 already suspended all immigrant visa processing for 26 African countries anyway, so these visas really are not of much concern here with this new development.
The nonimmigrant visas (NIVs) in Africa, mostly tourist visas, are overwhelmingly refused. To avoid complaints, the State Department closely holds actual refusal numbers per post. However, State is required to release refusal statistics by nationality, and that tells the tale. Some of the highest rates in Africa are Liberians 78.2 percent, Somalis 77 percent, Burundis 65.5 percent, and Beninese 61.5 percent, and Chadians 58.6 percent. And those numbers are pre-Trump II. In comparison, the historical refusal rates for most European countries were so low (below three percent) that the U.S. used that in part to give up even requiring visas from them years ago.
It is hard to say what the point of maintaining a visa office in a far-flung part of Africa is just to say “no” over and over again. State’s standard reply has to do with maintaining good relations with the host country (questionable on the face when there are so many refusals and immigrant visa processing is shut down completely). This also hints at an answer to why the U.S. has so many embassies and consulates in countries that arguably have little to do. Much of this network was established during the Cold War, when Washington viewed newly independent African states as key battlegrounds in its global competition with the Soviet Union. As African countries gained independence, both the United States and the USSR sought political influence, military access, and votes in international organizations. Establishing embassies also allowed the Americans to monitor Soviet activities and USAID contractors of varying sobriety and propriety. Although the Cold War ended in 1991, the diplomatic infrastructure remained in place as State resisted moves toward regional “hub” embassies brought about by the “peace dividend.” State currently still seeks to justify the mass of embassies, claiming they are there to counter the usurious Chinese Belt and Road Initiative without really explaining how they do that. Movie nights?
No need to worry, however, about the small percentage of Africans who might have succeeded in obtaining nonimmigrant visas in their home countries. Some 20 U.S. visas posts will remain open, and the applicants can apply there. The “closed” visa posts will still assist American Citizens and process special national interest visa cases and diplomatic applications. As for the rest, few African capitals have direct flights to the U.S. mainland anyway, so many travelers can apply enroute. Applicants must travel internationally to reach the United States anyway, so requiring some of them to travel to regional visa hubs is not an unreasonable burden. It’s an old system anyway; during my time processing visas in London, the embassy reserved a number of appointments for Iranian citizens, who would fly in on a weekly Swiss Air flight, get their visa, and head off to New York even as the U.S. maintained no diplomatic relations with Tehran.
There are two main reasons to shut down these African visa posts. Refusal rates are high enough to question maintaining separate processing facilities in every country. Maintaining an American diplomat overseas to process visas is expensive. He needs government housing, an office, a local staff, administrative support, security escorts, transportation, language training, education allowances for children, hardship and danger pay, and more (some of which albeit are fixed costs even if personnel headcount decreases), plus the actual sunk costs of his salary, benefits, and pension. There is no single official figure because costs vary widely by country, rank, and family size.
However, a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found the State Department spent about $3.1 billion on pay, benefits, and allowances for roughly 9,000 U.S. direct-hire employees serving overseas in FY 2023. That works out to an average of about $344,000 per overseas employee per year. An earlier 2006 GAO study estimated the cost of placing a U.S. Foreign Service officer overseas at approximately $400,000 annually. None of this even tries to calculate the lost cost of having that expensively-trained diplomat spend his time saying no to visas in Monrovia when he could be working on much more critical issues in Beijing.
The other reason to shut down these visa issuing posts is because it will likely slow down the number of visas issued to African travelers and thus the number of visa overstays in the U.S. Because the U.S. does not comprehensively track overstays, there is no single, reliable headcount. However, the best source is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Entry/Exit Overstay Report, which calculates overstay rates by nationality for visitors admitted as business or tourist travelers. It shows overstays for Africans ranged from a high of 49 percent for Chadians, to five percent for Ghana. Keep in mind this rate is not the percentage of a country’s citizens living illegally in the United States (no one knows that number because the census cannot by law ask about citizenship status). It is the percentage of a specific year’s visitor admissions that DHS could not confirm departed on time. Considering over 20,000 tourist visas are issued per year most every year just for Ghanaians, even five percent overstay by them represents a large and ever-growing number of actual people.
So what do we call the shutdown of visa posts in Africa? A good start.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Supreme Court, Birthright Citizenship, and Espionage
The Supreme Court will soon decide Trump v. Barbara, in which the president seeks by Executive Order to overturn the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. The Amendment says almost any child born on U.S. soil is automatically and forever an American citizen. The Court will most likely reflect long precedent to allow birthright citizenship as it exists today to stand unaltered. But its decision will have profound secondary effects, not the least of which is determining the future of birthright citizenship tourism and its possible effect on national security.
The question of whether most children born in the U.S. are citizens connects back to the deadly omissions of the Founding Fathers when they failed to address slavery in creating the country. The founding documents did not even recognize blacks as full humans, never mind considering granting those born here citizenship. In the lead up to the Civil War, when the right to vote became crucial as new states entered the Union slave or free, the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford held that those descended from African slaves could not be citizens of the United States. Some legal scholars drew implications from Scott to mean all children born in the United States to foreign parents were not automatically U.S. citizens.
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution was adopted in 1868, in the aftermath of the Civil War, as part of reconciling the status of millions of then-freed slaves. The Amendment’s citizenship clause specifically overruled Scott v. Sandford, stating “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Controversy erupted even as the Amendment was being drafted. Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania argued states should not be forced to grant citizenship to the children of “Asiatic” immigrants or “Gypsies” who, he said, did not share American values or owe true allegiance to the country. Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan stated the Amendment was written to exclude the children of “foreigners” and “aliens.” Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois went on to successfully clarify that “subject to the jurisdiction” meant completely under the legal authority of U.S. courts. Because immigrants were required to obey U.S. laws, could be tried in U.S. courts, and paid U.S. taxes, their children born on U.S. soil were included. The only noteworthy groups deliberately excluded were children of foreign diplomats, who were not subject to U.S. law via their diplomatic immunity, and initially Native Americans living on sovereign tribal lands. They answered to tribal governments not the U.S. government. The 14th Amendment’s concept of citizenship was fully tested in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark. The Supreme Court’s majority opinion confirmed birth on U.S. soil grants automatic citizenship, even if the parents are both foreigners or barred from ever becoming naturalized citizens themselves. Most mainstream constitutional scholars believe the legislative history as a whole, combined with Wong, supports citizenship for the children of aliens.
Birthright citizenship does leave a problem for America to deal with: will a foreign power, say China, use the idea to groom an American citizen who also owes allegiance to China into a spy, perhaps taking advantage of his American citizenship and highly-desired Mandarin language skills, to infiltrate him from the earliest stages into the CIA, State Department, NSA or military? Even short of actual spying, secondary allegiances can complicate decision-making in sensitive positions.
The issue is loyalty, not leverage (i.e., relatives for the Ministry of Truth to pressure in the home country, investments abroad to help or harm), which can be screened for. Intelligence officers of all nationalities have long-known that after money, ideology is the most powerful tool to convince someone to betray his government. Desire for importance, status, or appreciation from the “home” country closely follows. Things like blackmail do exist, just like in the movies, but are crude instruments that lead the target to resent the foreign government, not want to help it. The presence of a vast birth tourism industry, sending an estimated 60,000 Chinese to the U.S. a year to give birth to American citizens, sets the stage and raises the level of concern. Most of those Chinese births are economically-oriented, but the large number leaves room for bad actors. This all involves a lot of speculation, and it is well-known that foreign spies target Americans of all flavors, native born, or naturalized. But any mechanism that increases long-term Chinese access to the United States deserves scrutiny from a national security perspective.
Most debates over birthright citizenship focus on legal interpretation or immigration policy. The espionage question is one of national security. It asks whether a foreign government could exploit the doctrine for long-term intelligence purposes. While publicly known cases are impossible to locate, the job of intelligence professionals is to evaluate threats based not only on demonstrated harm but also on opportunity and intent. Birth tourism creates a mechanism by which foreign governments could establish long-term human footholds inside the United States. Whether that possibility is significant enough to justify changing a constitutional understanding that has existed for more than a century remains a central question. One hopes the Supreme Court gives this its due consideration in adjudicating Trump v. Barbara.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Why the Ben Franklin Fellowship at State?
The New York Times claims “a private conservative group’s involvement at the State Department has alarmed veteran diplomats and congressional Democrats who say it has established a worrisome degree of influence.” Eric Rubin, a retired diplomat of more than 40 years who recently led the mainstream State Department American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), wrote it “functions as the equivalent of a Communist Party cell in Soviet government ministries.” Some are even trying to out and doxx members who wish to remain anonymous. It’s the controversial Ben Franklin Fellowship (BFF).
The Fellowship is a D.C.-based nonprofit founded by former U.S. diplomats that brings together active officials (including Fellow Christopher Landau, Deputy Secretary of State), academics, and legislators to force reform at the U.S. State Department. The group says it is nonpartisan in not supporting any political party, but its aims and think pieces promote support for Secretary of State Marco Rubio in dismantling policies that have undermined diplomacy and left the Department less influential than it should be in major national security decisions. State has failed to reform itself, so something like BFF is badly needed.
That’s why I am a public member of Ben Franklin Fellows.
I speak only for myself about BFF. I have long believed (well before my whistleblower book about Iraq and subsequent forced retirement from State) that the 18th century institution was structurally resistant to change. The Trump administration changes have been sharp and quick, but I wonder if any less Draconian process would have produced any results at all — over my own 24-year-career at State I watched blue ribbon panels come and go alongside outside studies and white papers, all full of ideas that were ignored. To me, BFF is a public way of supporting change, even when it hurts and even when it sometimes hurts good people. It is a lot of weight to throw on to BFF. But you have to start somewhere.Since the end of WWII, when the task of nation-building across Europe and Japan was largely handed to the military even after it was first proposed by the Secretary of State, reform efforts at the Department have focused less on grand strategy and more on tweaks to the internal personnel systems and bureaucratic culture. Critics from Congress, presidential administrations, and diplomats themselves have long argued State is too hierarchical, slow-moving, insular, and constrained by outdated personnel practices. Despite repeated reform initiatives, many of the same complaints of rigid promotion systems, weak leadership accountability, poor technological modernization, and resistance to change, have persisted.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Is Iran a Turning Point?
The Iran War may prove to be little more than a blip on the world’s radar. Or its real significance may lie less in who wins militarily than in whether it accelerates global recognition that the United States is no longer willing or able to enforce the international order it created after 1945.
There is a strong argument that even as the missiles continue to fly the war is not that significant. It appears today the most likely outcome will be a return to something of a status quo in the Middle East. Everyone wants the oil to start flowing again, albeit for different reasons, and this is a powerful pull toward compromise. Iran will play its strongest card, opening the Strait of Hormuz to the best deal, while the U.S. will push its military advantage further forward to pressure Tehran to some kind of a better deal. If Iran signals it is willing to remain just a threshold nuclear state, this can be made to look good enough for both parties. But the paradigm shifts once hoped for will not happen. The current administration has limited political time, and shrinking leverage if the Democrats do well in the midterms. America’s allies in Europe and elsewhere have a long history of waiting out American adventures hoping the next president will play more nicely. Like so many other conflicts that changed little, history may more or less ignore this war.
The opposite argument requires focus on a longer sweep of history, which may come to see the Iran War as a significant marker in the slow-motion end of the global system set in place by the United States after WWII.
Some perspective is required to see just how dramatic those post-war events were in reshaping the planet and what might happen if they are gone. From WWII the United States emerged as the only major industrial power whose economy and infrastructure were intact, and it used that position to build a global economic system designed to avoid the instability that had helped produce depression and fascism. The two world wars shattered the old imperial order. World War I destroyed the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, while World War II fatally weakened Britain, France, and Japan, and accelerated decolonization. The U.S., alone with its nuclear weapons, was left the most powerful nation on earth.
America’s leaders rushed into the gap. Brilliantly, they did not seek the immediate gains of colonies of their own or brutal war reparations. They wanted a sustainable system, not a fragile empire, to replace the old way. At the Bretton Woods Conference, Washington created a new global economic system. It devised the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to stabilize currencies, provide reconstruction loans, and encourage development. The Federal Reserve Bank in New York became the world’s gold repository. The U.S. dollar became the world’s reserve currency, with other major currencies pegged to the dollar, giving the United States enormous financial influence. Through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947 and later the World Trade Organization the U.S. pushed against the tariffs which had previously encouraged world war to expand global commerce. The Marshall Plan poured billions into rebuilding Western Europe, alongside similar efforts in Japan. This not only created vast markets for American goods but also helped prevent another democracy-gutting economic collapse that might have fueled post-war communist movements as it had the fascists before it. The U.S. made it known it would function as the world’s policeman, unilaterally as necessary.
Despite a massive dose of propaganda to the contrary, this system was never altruistic. It was built from the ground up to serve American strategic interests and keep America the world’s most powerful nation. By guaranteeing access to trade routes through the U.S. Navy, maintaining open sea lanes, and underwriting security, Washington created the environment necessary for international trade to flourish. The United States stood alone at its center as both creator and chief beneficiary.
Time and again, despite horrendous blunders like the soul-crushing Vietnam War and failure to bring the collapsed Soviet Union into the world economy, the system favored the U.S.; it should have, having been designed that way. Through some forward-thinking diplomacy, Eastern Europe became capitalist and denuclearized without shots fired. China, with the exception of an expedition into Vietnam, stayed within its borders and evolved into one of the world’s most powerful capitalist economies. The robust South Korean economy, and that of Taiwan, was created by U.S. investment and sustained by the U.S. military to further American reach into Asia. OPEC rose to threaten the world economy and then was tamed. After Desert Storm, the United States emerged as the dominant military power in the Gulf and could have converted that position into control over regional energy flows. It chose instead to preserve the broader international system that benefited it more in the long run. Dictators were supported or selected by Washington all around the world to favor American economics, and discarded in CIA-led overthrows when no longer needed. Pundits with more imagination than knowledge once proclaimed “Japan as Number One” for a few years at some point. But despite ups and downs, the U.S.-led system prevailed.
Fast-forward to May 2026 and the real question is whether America still possesses the political patience and strategic discipline required to sustain the global order built after 1945. Questions are arising about America’s political willingness to fight for open sea lanes. With a few notable exceptions, America with Israel as its Rottweiler has for six decades acted as the principal enforcer of global nuclear nonproliferation. Will she abandon this role this time in return for Iranian promises? Ukraine has become an example of festering strategic drift, with Washington oscillating between commitments that are costly enough to prolong the war but insufficient to shape its outcome. Iraq, Afghanistan, and now perhaps Iran have ended the likely future use of the big blunt stick of coercive diplomacy the U.S. could hold over the world’s rogues. This is not geopolitical strategy anymore. It’s improvisation. America can still lash out (Libya, or Venezuela, for example) with limited consequences but the post-9/11 quasi-religious belief that American military superiority could quickly eliminate threats before they fully materialized is gone. In Iran, Washington once again demonstrates overwhelming firepower but struggles to produce a political settlement in line with U.S. goals.
If the conclusion of the Iran War is a return to the status quo, it will further expose the limits of American power brewing for several decades. More importantly, with the questions above being asked in capitals around the world, we are left with the fear that we are living through the ragged end of the post-WWII system. It is a subtle and potentially dangerous situation, the quiet retraction of an American-led world order without the safety of a replacement. We call that chaos, and chaos is when states make their most dangerous calculations.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Trump Doctrine
The deranged left claims Donald Trump’s foreign policy is chaotic, that it has no broad goal. So it is good to see Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a little-noticed statement, lay out the broad outlines of Trump’s foreign policy, and thus his State Department’s own marching orders. Rubio managed to work in some “inside baseball” points as well, leaving clues as to how the State reorganization is proceeding with like-minded individuals seeded into key positions in the bureaucracy.
Rubio began with the bottom line up front: American foreign policy is going to be about American goals, not some sort of global largess.
This President inherited 30 years of foreign policy built around what was good for the world. The decisions we made as a government in trade and foreign policy were basically, is it good for the world and the global community? And under President Trump, we are making foreign policy based on is it good for America. What that means is foreign policy is about three things: Does it make America stronger? Does it make America safer? Does it make America richer? If something doesn’t do those three things—and hopefully all three things—we are not doing it.
This explains Rubio’s gutting of a whole vertical stack of State Department offices on his revised organizational chart whose names begin with the word “global,” such as the office for Global Women’s Issues. The current foreign policy system was built primarily around two ideas: that is was America’s responsibility to right all wrongs world wide to its own liking, and competition with the Russians during the Cold War to gain leverage in the developing nations of Africa and Southeast Asia. The latter faded with the shifts of history (though the Cold Warriors lurking in government would love to revive the Cold War using China as the punching bag) and the former morphed under a succession of presidencies into things like the U.S. scolding the world about human rights (while ignoring the dark stains on our society at home) and pressing social justice programs empowering women, LGBT people, and minorities around the world in tune with the woke America those State Department officials wanted to believe was true. That was former SecState Hillary Clinton’s State Department.
Well, one of the main tools for enacting that kind of foreign policy is now gone, USAID. Rubio reminded everyone:
Foreign aid. We were funding some crazy stuff—crazy stuff! You tell me, how does a puppet show in some country around the world make us stronger, safer, more prosperous? So we got rid of the puppet shows and many other things. I’m sure they were very good puppet shows, and I’m sure some charity can go pay for it, but the American taxpayer should not.
The crazy projects way of doing business reached its high point in the nation building fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan. The social justice side of things may have found its pinnacle under the Biden administration, when Pride Flags and Black Lives Matter banners were displayed outside many American embassies. It is certainly true many countries treat their minorities poorly. It is less clear, Rubio seems to say, that fixing that as a foreign policy priority is America’s business.
Rubio also made claim to his department’s role in Trump’s mass deportation plans.
I say this unapologetically—we are actively searching for other countries to take people from third countries, not just El Salvador, but other countries, to say, “We want to send you the most despicable human beings to your countries. Will you do that as a favor to us?” The further away from America, the better, so they can’t come back across the border. I am not apologetic for that. The President was elected to keep America safe and get rid of a bunch of perverts and pedophiles and child rapists out of our country.
He then turned to his department’s own reorganization to meet the demands of the new administration.
We have stopped student visas for people who burn down our universities and take over libraries and harass people. Why are we giving student visas to people to create disruption? We have taken away student visas from people who came here to do that.
ICE does the heavy lifting of actually arresting and physically deporting illegal aliens from the United States, it is the State Department, through its Visa Office in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, that actually issues the visas abroad in the first place. Rubio is calling for a new vision in those visa decisions, one that looks to the anticipated behavior of the applicant once in the U.S., not just his paper qualification for the visa itself. It is a change, if fully implemented, as drastic as those following 9/11 when visa officers were repurposed from basically tourism advocates to pseudo-law enforcement.
It is simple—if you are coming to America to start riots, we will not give you, and we will take away, a student visa. By the way, every country I have traveled to, 14 countries in 14 weeks, and you know what they say to me? “Yes, that is what we would do too.” The only people that seem to disagree are a handful of federal judges and a bunch of crazy people who get paid to write a report.
While ICE makes the arrests in the U.S., it is the State Department that makes the actual legal revocations of the visas. In line with this, Rubio announced “his officials are evaluating whether any of the anti-Israel protesters who invaded a Columbia University building [recently] should see their temporary visas revoked.” Rubio said on X the State Department is “reviewing the visa status of the trespassers and vandals” after New York police made 80 arrests at the campus. A State Department spokesperson said “We are upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process.” That is a new emphasis under Rubio. Trump critics claim this “America First” policy will collide with the upcoming World Cup matches scheduled this year in the United States. Not so, said Rubio, explaining “We have very talented consular affairs people, but technology, working with consultants, and millions of people coming into the country for this.”
Finally, Rubio praised State’s most public facing office, the one that issues U.S. passports to the public.
Some of us who served in Congress recognized a year and a half ago we had a meltdown under Biden. You couldn’t get a passport. We had people calling in on Friday, “My passport expires,” and in the month of March, 2.78 million Americans got their passports. That’s the largest single-month processing of passports ever.
It is more than a coincidence that Rubio in his statement called out by name only two not-so-well-known offices at State, the Visa Office and the Passport Office. Both have new heads, and both men are members of the Ben Franklin Fellowship (BFF.) The BFF believes “U.S. international engagement should recognize the primacy of American sovereignty and the obligation to defend national borders… The central purpose of U.S. diplomacy is to serve the national interest. We endorse the careful husbanding of limited resources, both budget and staff, rather than engaging in perpetual, unfunded expansion.” In its own words, BFF is “a community of current and past State Department employees and foreign affairs practitioners who support traditional, Constitutional American values in international affairs.”
Layoffs are not expected to hit passport and visa processing within the Bureau of Consular Affairs. That bureau has around 2,400 domestic employees, about half of whom process passports, removing a large swath of the workforce from the RIF pool.
Rubio has seeded other BFF members at key nodes within State, most visibly as Deputy Secretary (Rubio’s Number 2) and as the acting head of the Director General’s office, the part of the State Department which sits atop a pyramid of offices controlling internal budgets, personnel assignments, discipline, and promotions. It grants Rubio a lot of control over the Department, and represents an understanding of the mechanics of the bureaucracy that his predecessors, former Secretaries of State Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo, never achieved.
Rubio gave no hints whatsoever that he is done making changes at Foggy Bottom. Keep a close eye on his public statements for clues for which direction he intends to take his department.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Embassies to Close
A draft internal State Department memo (denied by Secretary of State Marco Rubio) shows the Trump administration is considering closing 10 embassies and 17 consulates and to consolidate staff in Japan and Canada. Key “can’t do without them” functions of closed posts will be transferred to nearby surviving embassies. Whether the eventual closures involve these or other posts abroad, any change would be a welcome and important part of State’s reorganization. Domestic changes without changes overseas are little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the ship of state.
Six of the embassies proposed in the draft for closure would be in Africa, including the Central African Republic, Eritrea, Gambia, Lesotho, the Republic of Congo, and South Sudan. The memo also recommends closing two small embassies in Europe, Luxembourg and Malta, as well as the diplomatic missions in Grenada and the Maldives. The memo suggests significantly downsizing or eliminating the embassy in Mogadishu, Somalia.
Most of the consulates recommended for closure are in Europe. Five are in France, in Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseilles, Rennes, and Strasbourg. Two are in Germany, Düsseldorf and Leipzig. Another two, Mostar and Banja Luka, are in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The memo also suggests closing consulates in Thessaloniki, Greece; Florence, Italy; Ponta Delgada, Portugal, Edinburgh, Douala, Cameroon, Medan, Indonesia, Durban, South Africa, and Busan, South Korea.
It seems like a lot at first glance, and there will be much gnashing of teeth over the closures in Africa, claiming we’ll be giving ground away to the Chinese. But a closer look suggests something different, perhaps an attempt by State to game the system and create the appearance of great change without really losing much. Some on Trump’s team already suspect the China threat has been overhyped by the aid establishment. “That’s a f*cking myth that they tell you to sell the f*cking aid,” one Trump administration official said. “This is not like we’re going to keep paying for 40 years for you to have your health care,” another Trump administration official involved said of African governments.
From the ground level view, most of the African posts named are already quite small, a handful of Americans, many of whom are just there on temporary duty as most Foreign Service Officers (especially with families) are loathe to volunteer for such tiny and often dangerous places. Many worked closely with the now-gone USAID anyway. If the concern is combatting Chinese influence, Congress should call in each of the countries’ ambassadors and ask him to list the five concrete things his embassy did last week to counter the Chinese — no broad stroke arguments about “presence.” It will likely be a short list, and the closure of the embassies will have little affect on the State Department budget overall. Most of the posts are Cold War relics anyway, stood up in the 1960s to push back against Russian influence. It was a measuring contest then, and will be little more in our new Cold War with China. What are America’s interests in those countries anyway?
The posts in Europe closing are also small, most just one or two officers. They do little business besides the odd consular service for tourists, and are mostly vestigial limbs left over from the archipelago of U.S. installations post-WWII. Closing them may provide a one-time bump when the valuable real estate is sold off, but otherwise it is unlikely they will be missed. Five consulates in France closing, in the age of Internet communications and France’s excellent high-speed rail? Sorry, another smoke and mirrors game by State. And the same goes for those posts left over as once-important outposts of America’s idiotic foreign adventures, places like Grenada, Mogadishu, South Sudan, and those in Bosnia and Herzegovina. One might better ask why they remained open in the first place.
That leaves the open sucking chest wounds of the three sites in Iraq. The embassy there was purposefully built to be the largest physical diplomatic post in the world, bigger than the Vatican and visible from space. Full kitchens with dishwashers were built into the government housing there, and space allotted to a someday Baghdad Safeway diplomats would shop at. A school building was constructed looking forward to the day whole families would be assigned there. It was the ultimate expression of American hubris, wrought in stone, and was planned as the centerpiece of the new American empire the Iraq War was supposed to herald. Downsizing it in 2025 would be the final hah hah to all of that, assuming you also forget the thousands of Americans who died in that now forgotten cause.
In sum, the changes proposed for State abroad, if true, are too little, and reak of gaming the process. The real list may be different, but you get the idea of how posts can be evaluated. There should be a hint in all this of the end of an era, an experiment really, in the post-WWII global empire. It was to be supported by American foreign aid (as it was by tariff-free free trade) and occasionally goosed into line by the odd military flex or two (or ten…) Most of what State is losing has already been lost, and the world — and America — deserves a new chance at a different way of doing business.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Tough Times Ahead at Foggy Bottom?
If you had “State Department” on your DOGE bingo card as the next agency teed up, mark yourself a winner. But are tough times ahead for Foggy Bottom?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on April 22 unveiled the beginnings of a reorganization of the State Department, calling the diplomatic agency “bloated, bureaucratic” and “beholden to radical political ideology.” But to some critics, it looks like a good start but has much further to go to create lasting progress in line with the Trump administration’s view of the changing U.S. role in the world. Among other things, the reorganization does not address any cuts to embassies and consulates abroad, the meat and potatoes of the State Department. One Foreign Service officer said the plan moved a lot of pieces around, but outside of the sleepy democracy and human rights division being gutted, most of the changes were not significant. “I wouldn’t call these sweeping reforms… yet,” the employee said.
The most drastic but still ho-hum change is the elimination of the Office of the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights. Some elements of the office, including the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and one for refugees, would be folded into an office for foreign assistance and humanitarian aid, according to a reorganization chart posted on the State Department website. Rubio wrote the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor became a “platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas” against conservative leaders, including in Poland, Hungary, and Brazil, and to promote an arms embargo against Israel. Rubio also accused the Bureau for Population, Refugees, and Migration of sending millions of taxpayer dollars to non-government groups to promote mass migration, including “the invasion on our southern border.”
Rubio’s plan calls for reducing the total number of domestic State Department offices from 734 to 602, a drop of 17 percent, some 700 positions, though a detailed list has not been published. Rubio also instructed senior officials to reduce the number of U.S.-based employees overall by 15 percent in other individual domestic offices by July. Some once high-profile offices, such as the Iraq war-era Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, which aimed unsuccessfully to anticipate and prevent global conflict, will be closed. A new Bureau of Emerging Threats will be created focusing on cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
Rubio said the State Department’s size and costs had “soared” over the past 15 years. So future unspecified plans are to combine overlapping offices and eliminate some programs not mandated by Congress. “Region-specific functions will be consolidated to increase functionality, redundant offices will be removed, and non-statutory programs that are misaligned with America’s core national interests will cease to exist,” said Rubio, though he did not give any specifics. In an email to staff, Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau said implementation would be led by an internal working group that would come up with “thoughtful plans” aiming to adopt the changes by July 1.
Rubio’s plan is not much more than a good start. An earlier draft memo memo (called “fake news” by Rubio, likely written as a trial balloon by outgoing Pete Marocco, who left the State Department after having overseen the elimination of USAID) called for the Trump administration to cut some 48 percent of the State Department’s funding next fiscal year, mostly from its external programs. The draft proposed eliminating almost all funding for international organizations like the United Nations and NATO, ending the budget for international peacekeeping operations, and curtailing all of the department’s educational and cultural exchanges, like the Fulbright Program. It would also have cut funding for humanitarian assistance and global health programs by more than 50 percent. Many of those changes would have been drastic and unlikely to survive Congressional scrutiny; going forward, Rubio still needs to show his hand on low bang-for-the-buck international organization funding and post-WWII soft power programs. No more efforts to promote LGBT rights abroad, or right the world’s ills by pouring taxpayer money over them (though to be fair, Rubio did already cut State’s Office of Global Women’s Issues and its Diversity and Inclusion Office.) This reorganization should be a new day for diplomacy, but — so far — it is not.
There has been some deeper progress, and thus cause for optimism. Even before the budget memo described above reached the White House, the State Department placed all full-time staff from its “censorship office” on administrative leave as the agency moves to shut down the group altogether. Originally founded by Barack Obama and known formally then as the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub, the office within the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy supposedly monitors, flags, and counters content deemed “foreign disinformation.” R/FIMI was created out of the ruins of the closure of its Obama predecessor in December 2024 following a series of First Amendment lawsuits discovered the Center was demanding from social media the censorship of American conservative voices. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described instances when government officials would “scream” and “curse” at Meta employees, threatening repercussions if certain content wasn’t removed.
The Center was also used as a cut-out to fund The Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofits, to feed blacklists to online ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling “disinformation,” the Washington Examiner reported. This same “disinformation” group received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities tied to the Center.
With its State Department funding (the first State Department-backed group supporting GDI was the National Endowment for Democracy) GDI identified the 10 “riskiest” news outlets for disinformation to include The American Conservative. You be the judge of the validity of that use of taxpayer money, and the direction United States diplomacy was headed.
There’s more to come at State (the layoffs planned for July 1 should be transitionary) and reason to call all this a good start — if Rubio follows through and if his domestic cuts are met with similar reshaping abroad.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Chinese Honeypots, Sex, and American Diplomats
The U.S. government recently banned American personnel in China, as well as family members and contractors with security clearances, from any romantic or sexual relationships with Chinese citizens. The policy was put into effect by departing Ambassador Nicholas Burns in January shortly before he left China. The danger of a honeypot scheme, romantically entrapping a diplomat to coerce him into giving up some of America’s secrets, is apparently too high to allow for sexual shenanigans.
A more limited version of the policy was enacted last summer prohibiting U.S. personnel from romantic and sexual relations with Chinese citizens working as local support staff at the U.S. Embassy and consulates in China (including Hong Kong.) But Burns broadened it to a blanket ban after concerns were expressed by Congress. The only exception is personnel with pre-existing relationships, who can apply for exemptions. The new directive mandates anyone with an existing Chinese partner seek an exemption, end the relationship, or leave their post if the exemption is denied. Anyone who violates the policy, say by trying to hide a relationship, will be ordered out of China immediately with all the career consequences you’d expect. Until the ban in January, U.S. personnel in China were required only to report any intimate contact with Chinese citizens to the Embassy’s Regional Security Office, but were not explicitly forbidden from sexual or romantic relationships. The new ban only applies to American diplomats stationed in China and their relationships with locals; diplomats outside of China who enter into romantic relationships with Chinese nationals face other, less stringent, reporting requirements and prohibitions.
Why all the fuss? Because China is considered the top country globally for honeypot schemes. One former Canadian diplomat characterized the situation as “countries have been using sex to gather intel for over 1,000 years, and it hasn’t slowed a bit. Many countries are still carrying on sexpionage, and the number one country is China.” Peter Mattis, a former CIA analyst, said there were at least two publicized cases in which Chinese agents seduced American diplomats in China. “This new rule change suggests the [Chinese] have gotten a lot more aggressive at trying to access the embassy and U.S. government.” Chinese law requires citizens to cooperate with the intelligence services, so even if a Chinese girlfriend is not a spy herself, she may be required to introduce her diplomatic boyfriend to an “uncle” who is.
The UK’s MI5 saw honeytraps as such a concern that it prepared a 14-page document and distributed it to hundreds of British banks, businesses, and financial institutions. Titled “The Threat from Chinese Espionage,” the document described a wide-ranging Chinese effort to blackmail Western businessmen over sexual relationships.
Diplomats and others being forbidden to have romantic or sexual relationships with local nationals abroad is nothing particularly new, albeit new in its present form for China. Such prohibitions were very much a part of the Cold War, and were especially strict within the Soviet Bloc countries, for the same reasons as in modern China. In other countries the relationships may be allowed, as well as regular non-sexual friendships, although reporting of them is part of a system designed to weed out spies. The exact list of such countries is classified, but we can guess it includes places like North Korea and Cuba, and not countries like Sweden or the UK. The most recently declassified list of such criteria countries dates back to the Cold War, 1987.
That 1987 document also lays out the rules for all contact reporting with designated foreign country nationals, and includes an almost apologetic rationale sure to assuage jilted lovers in Beijing:
“It is an unfortunate fact of life that targeting and exploitation by foreign intelligence services are occupational hazards for the employees of all foreign affairs agencies because of their job functions and access to classified information. The Department does not wish to intrude into the private lives of its employees. Nonetheless, all contacts with foreign nationals must be considered in the context of your position as an official of the U.S. government and not as a private citizen — that is how the foreign national will perceive you.”
But don’t get too comfortable here at home, either, in intimate contacts with foreign nationals. Intelligence experts are becoming increasingly convinced six high end brothels busted last year in the suburbs of Boston and Washington, D.C. were set up by a foreign nation — possibly China — as an espionage honeytrap. The brothels targeted politicians, high ranking government officials, and defense contractors in the Cambridge and Tyson’s Corner areas. Members of Congress, military officers, and national security contractors who possessed security clearances were among the steady customers, prosecutors say. Clients, who paid up to $600 an hour, also included corporate executives, professors, lawyers, and scientists.
The concept of the honeypot in espionage has a long and salacious history. It’s one of the most classic tools in the spycraft playbook, blending psychological manipulation, seduction, and human weakness to achieve intelligence goals. Use of the technique can be traced to the Greeks and Romans, with dramatic cases strew throughout the Cold War era, including William Kampiles, a CIA clerk seduced by a woman linked to the KGB, leading him to sell the KH-11 spy satellite manual to the Soviets in the 1970s, and U.S. Marine Clayton Lonetree, whose 1980s relationship with a KGB operative lead Russian spies to direct access into the American Embassy in Moscow. Honeypots remain relevant, especially with digital extensions (catfishing, sextortion) and extensions into cyberspace — fake profiles on dating apps or social media lure targets into sharing personal or even classified information. New battlegrounds emerge regularly, to include LinkedIn, where faux job interest for techies escalates to paid trips to China, where human intel ops and honeypots take over. And don’t think for a minute the good guys don’t use the same tricks as the bad guys in the Great Game.
The goal with the changes in allowed relationships in Mission China is to lessen the chances that it all won’t happen again. Those changes in cutting off physical relationships will no doubt be accompanied by digital seduction awareness training for diplomats, military officers, and others who travel or deal with sensitive data. It’s essentially an attempt to “honeypot-proof” things for the 21st century. Will it all happen again anyway? Given human weakness, biology versus tradecraft, despite best efforts, it most certainly will.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Green Card Take-Away from Mahmoud Khalil
Whether you believe Mahmoud Khalil deserves to be deported for his anti-Semitic stance while a student at Columbia University, or whether you believe he was righteously exercising his First Amendment rights there, his green card revocation stinks. It is a perfect example of “we told you so” about powers granted so freely to the government, in this case by a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 covering deportable aliens and a similar one covering American citizens.
Donald Trump made it clear Khalil was arrested and his green card revoked because of his activism. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” wrote Trump in a Truth Social post. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other universities across the country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.” The actions against Khalil are of a set; Axios reported on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s plan to use AI to comb the social media accounts of student visa holders in a search of terrorist sympathies. The administration is determined to make an example of Columbia, announcing it was canceling $400 million in grants with the school. It has also warned 60 other colleges of possible anti-Semitism penalties.
In Khalil’s case, following a habeaous corpus petition filed by his lawyers, Khalil was granted a hearing challenging his arrest. The judge did not make any immediate decisions about his detention. He did temporarily bar the government from removing Khalil from the United States.
The significant First Amendment issues aside for now (a big aside) Khalil’s green card was revoked under a little-used part of immigration law. The Government of the United States can take away green cards from legal permanent residents, as well as student visas, if “The Secretary of State determines that the applicant’s activities abroad are causing or are likely to cause serious damage to the national security or the foreign policy of the United States.” If the government feels it is against its interest for you to have a card or visa and thus the freedom to travel, to enter and depart the United States if you wish to, it will just take it away. The law allows them to do this prospectively, the “or are likely to cause…” part of the law, meaning you don’t need to have done anything. The government just needs to decide that you might.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused Khalil of participating in protests that he described as anti-Semitic and supportive of Hamas. Foreigners who come to the United States and do such things, he said, will have their visas or green cards revoked and be kicked out. “This is not about free speech,” Rubio said. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”
It does not stop with aliens. The Secretary of State may also order the revocation of any U.S. passport for national security reasons, same as Khalil’s green card, albeit without the looming penalty of deportation. The legal authority for the U.S. Secretary of State is primarily found in 22 U.S. Code § 211a and 22 U.S. Code § 2705.
One of the most noteworthy cases of an ordered revocation based on the Secretary of State’s fiat was Phillip Agee. Agee, an ex-intelligence officer, in the 1970’s exposed CIA officers identities. According to the Supreme Court, “In 1974, Agee called a press conference in London to announce his ‘campaign to fight the United States CIA wherever it is operating.’ He declared his intent ‘to expose CIA officers and agents and to take the measures necessary to drive them out of the countries where they are operating.'” Agee, by his own assertion, devoted consistent effort to that plan, and traveled extensively to other countries to carry it out.
Agee’s case prompted the Supreme Court to review the Department of State’s ability to revoke U.S. passports simply because the government didn’t want someone to hold one for “national security” reasons. The Court upheld the government’s ability to do so after lower courts said no. The Court stated that “The right to hold a passport is subordinate to national security and foreign policy considerations.”
That last sentence took on chilling new meaning in the case of Anwar Al-Awlaki. We learned via a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act request that prior to having him and his 16-year-old son murdered via drone in 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton secretly revoked their passports, as Al-Awlaki was a Qaeda propagandist, and U.S. Citizen. The State Department tried to invite al-Awlaki into the U.S. Embassy in Yemen so they could hand him a letter announcing the revocation and so that they could encourage him to return to the U.S. to face charges. Six months later (al-Awlaki never dropped by the Embassy, by the way), the U.S. Government simply killed him. Two weeks later it killed his 16-year-old son via another drone strike.
Though the exact details of these types of revocation cases are classified, they typically fall under the broader legal framework of U.S. foreign relations and counterterrorism policies. In recent years, court challenges have been brought by individuals whose passports or visas were revoked. For example, individuals who have been denied passports or had them revoked argue violations of due process or freedom of movement. However, the courts tend to defer to the government in national security cases, allowing the executive branch wide discretion in handling these issues.
Depending on how his lawyers wish to present the case, Khalil’s revocation may end up at the Supreme Court as a First Amendment issue. It depends, like the old joke, which came first, the chicken or the egg. If the Court is willing to see the result of the revocation — the silencing of Kahlil and thus denial of his free speech rights — as predominant, new free speech legal ground may be broken and the deportation stayed. However, if the Court were to take the position this is just another national security case to be handled by an immigration judge and the revocation thus not reaching to offending the First Amendment (likely) Khalil will simply be deported under the sweeping, long-standing powers granted to the government to control the travel of both aliens and American citizens.
That will leave the biggest issue of the case unresolved. There are so many reasons not to listen to an anti-Semite like Khalil, but few to justify silencing him with an overly-broad law that pends on the Secretary of State’s personal decree. We are not obligated to defend Khalil’s beliefs, but are required to defend his rights. The responsibility for bringing that to the fore will ultimately rest with the Supreme Court if not with this case then the next..
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Five Questions Explain Why the H1-B Visa Needs Reformed
Five questions to explain why the H1-B visa needs to be reformed.
1) What is an H1-B visa?
Visas for foreigners to travel temporarily to the U.S. are designated by letters and numbers. B-1 is a business visa, B-2 is for tourists. H1-A allows foreign nurses to work in the U.S. while H1-B is for highly skilled workers — think AI scientists, programmers, and engineers — to work in the U.S. Unlike most nonimmigrant visas, H1-B is considered a visa with duel intent, meaning it is understood most holders will go on to apply for green cards, permanent residence in the U.S., and never return home to their foreign residence.
Created in 1990, the H-1B is an employer-sponsored visa that authorizes foreigners to work in the U.S. for up to six years. Tech companies and IT consultancies are the top recipients. Every year, a government lottery awards 65,000 slots to applicants with an undergraduate degree and another 20,000 to those with advanced degrees (universities and nonprofits are exempt from these caps.) The private-sector allocation is typically filled within days, hence a lottery to chose finalists for the visa. More on this in a moment.
2) Who are the H1-Bs in the U.S.?
The majority of H1-Bs work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, with computer-related occupations accounting for 65 percent. This was followed by about 10 percent distributed among architecture, engineering, and surveying. Amazon was the top employer of H-1Bs in 2024, hiring more than 13,000. Other top employers were Google (4th), Meta (6th), Microsoft (7th), Apple (8th), and IBM (10th.) Tesla ranked 22nd. The rest of the top employers are Indian staffing companies (see below.) All successful H1-Bs came through the lottery system.
3) Does the Lottery Assure the U.S. of Getting the Best and Brightest from Abroad?
Since 2004, the number of new H-1B visas issued has been capped at 85,000 per year, 20,000 of which are reserved for foreign students with master’s degrees or higher from American universities (the cap does not apply to universities, think tanks, and other non-profit groups, so more are issued.) These limited slots are chased by some 386,000 approved H-1B applications in fiscal year 2023, all thrown into that lottery.
So that winnows out the best candidates? Nope, sometimes just the opposite. Or maybe better to say any of the best and brightest are chosen by dumb luck and have just as much chance as the dull and dim. Because so many more people want an H1-B visa than there are visas available, a lottery is held. The lottery does not look at the quality or credentials of the applicant; he’s just thrown into the hopper to try his luck. All that is needed is the minimum qualification to enter, so many excellent candidates to fill jobs badly needed in the U.S. are never even considered.
Worse yet, the lottery is dominated by IT staffing firms which routinely flood it with entries, often for more visas than they need, crowding out companies that play by the rules and submit for specific, individual workers. Many of the world’s smartest engineers are shut out from the most lucrative, in-demand jobs, and shortages at the top end persist. It works like this: American Company A needs a programmer. Rather than try to recruit abroad and then navigate the cumbersome U.S. immigration system alone, they contract with an IT staffing firm, usually located in India (there are more than a million Indians in the U.S. on H-1 B visas, 72 percent of the whole; five of the top ten H1-B firms are Indian), for such a person, any person who fits the general bill. The IT staffing firm then recruits say 100 such programmers and dumps them all in the lottery hoping one will win. That’s your man!
The paperwork is sometimes tidied up to change the employer from the staffing firm to American Company A. In some cases even the lottery winner can be substituted for a preferred candidate. It makes it near-impossible for a specific individual to make it through the process. The lottery — by design — doesn’t reward top talent. It rewards luck and gaming the system. So it is not surprising 85 percent of H-1B petitions are awarded to employers paying well below the median wage, as determined by occupation and location. The floor for the H-1B visa salary is only $60,000, a number that has not be raised since, well, since when 60k was a decent salary in the IT industry. Even the the median compensation was only $118,000 fiscal year 2023.
4) Do H1-B Workers Compete with Americans for Jobs?
The law says H1-B workers are supposed to be paid the prevailing wage for their job, based on the Department of Labor statistics. In reality, the Economic Policy Institute found that 60 percent of H-1B positions were assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation. A Government Accounting Office report found that between June 1, 2009, and July 30, 2010, 83 percent of H-1B jobs were certified at Level 1 (Entry-level.) This does not mean the workers themselves were entry-level, only that to save money some highly-skilled workers were down-labeled to make them cheaper to hire. Companies get low-cost employees, and the worker himself considers the eventual Green Card enough a part of his compensation that he tolerates the lower wage. The H1-B workers can’t complain too much; their visa is for a specific company and they are like indentured servants, unable to freely change jobs and thus made to take what they are given. Too bad about the displaced American workers priced out of the market.
5) What Can Be Done to Fix This?
Elon Musk and other tech barons argue the H-1B visa program is critical to ensuring American companies can find highly skilled labor that may not be easily available in the U.S. labor force. Trump himself has spoken highly of the program, ensuring its continued viability.
“Ultimately, if you’re going to have a skilled worker program for ‘skilled’ workers, you don’t award these visas via a lottery,” said Eric Ruark, the director of research at NumbersUSA, an organization that advocates for tighter immigration controls. “Obviously, that’s not how you find the best and the brightest.” To make the program better, dump the H1-B visa lottery in favor of a merit-based program for skilled workers that assigns points for various criteria, including education and work experience, similar to how Canada and other Western nations allocate their “Green Cards.” Another possible approach, considered during Trump 1.0, would be to prioritize allocation of visas by wages. One way or another replace luck with skill to the benefit of the United States.
It is also time to raise the salary floor for H1-B workers to make Americans more competitive for their jobs. The Department of Labor needs to update salary schedules more frequently, with an eye toward what real wages in the IT world are. And enforcement of H1-B regulations must eliminate more highly-skilled workers being used to fill entry-level jobs to get around wage caps. There should be no competition between American workers and H1-Bs.
Raise the overall number of H1-B visas available. Exempt “critical” industries such as defense oriented companies from the numerical cap. To get more of the world’s best, the U.S. needs to open more doors to them.
Continue to streamline the H1-B application process. The January 17 H-1B visa reforms are a good start but still not enough.
What should not be done is to eliminate the H1-B visa. The program as it stands today is necessary but not sufficient, and ripe for overhaul as part of the greater scrutiny Trump seeks to apply to all immigration to the United States.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump’s Five Million Dollar Gold Card Visa
If you’re hung up on the idea of selling American citizenship, that horse left the barn decades ago. What’s left at issue is just how much it should cost.
“We’re going to be selling a gold card,” President Donald Trump said from the Cabinet Room recently. “You have a green card. This is a gold card. We’re going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million, and that’s going to give you green card privileges, plus it’s going to be a route to citizenship. And wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card.” Highly skilled people can also get in on the deal if they can find a sponsor. “Companies can buy gold cards and, in exchange, get those visas to hire new employees,” Trump said. He estimates he can sell a million of them.
Trump is talking about changes to America’s current citizenship for sale scheme, the EB-5 visa. That visa, if it is held for six years, leads to citizenship. It requires a foreigner to create a new business through investment that creates or sustains at least 10 American jobs, or buy an existing business resulting in at least a 40 percent increase in the net worth or number of employees. In the case of a troubled business, an EB-5 investor may rely on “job maintenance,” that the number of existing employees is, or will be, no less than the pre-investment level for a period of at least two years.
What’s really required, in addition to the usual vetting, is money, at least $1,050,000 in most cases, $800,00 if the investment is in a rural or high-unemployment area (most investors go for the cheaper option, called a Targeted Employment Area.) The paperwork is significantly backed up, but after you invest the money and wait three to six years for adjudication, you’ve bought yourself a path to U.S. citizenship.
The problem is the scheme has not worked as well as it should have. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik stated the program is rife with “nonsense, make believe, and fraud.” He was likely referring to the many fraudulent investments marketed to EB-5 investors abroad, particularly housing developments and golf courses that absorb investment money but never seem to appear on the ground. He may also be referring to a U.S. government decision to allow overseas investors to pool their money for an investment, meaning no one person puts a million dollars at risk. Another decision allows the investor to borrow his million abroad, a loan to invest in the U.S., meaning if the loan went sour abroad so did the U.S. investment. Things got even shadier when promissory notes began being accepted in lieu of the bulk of the one million investment as cash. There were also some notable successes funded with EB-5 money, including Hudson Yards in Manhattan and the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn.
Overall the program suffered from a lack of transparency in what investment would be approved by the USG, and a lack of enforcement to ensure the investors followed through on their side of the deal after the visa was actually issued. Traffic was only so-so — desire for the visa peaked in 2015, when the minimum investment was only $500,000. At that peak the government approved about 15,000 visas a year, a long shot short of Trump’s projected million visas sold for his $5 million Gold Card. The long processing times have not helped business. Overall, 2020, 78,278 investors applied for the EB-5 program. Some 80 percent of those investors came from four countries, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom, with China clearly in the lead: in 2014, of the total of 10,692 EB-5 visas issued, 85 percent were for Chinese nationals.
The lack of broader interest in the American EB-5 has nothing to do with actual demand by the world’s wealthy.
The world’s wealthy love second passports, especially if the principal happens to have a lot of money but only a passport that opens few doors or can easily be taken away in a country like Nigeria or Vietnam. Brokers suggest passports from some 28 countries might be available, including NATO member Turkey (about $400,000) and EU member Portugal (roughly $541,000.) A number of smaller Caribbean nations like St. Lucius offer passports for sale, or, if a little lipstick is needed for the pig, passports for investment. Details and requirements vary greatly, as does cost, from a few hundred thousand to over one million dollars. To apply for a Portugal golden visa, for example, one qualifying option is to make a large non-refundable contribution to an approved cultural organization. In the Caribbean, you can make a contribution toward funds the government designed to help invest in varying sectors, like infrastructure. Some Caribbean countries also allow you to qualify for citizenship by purchasing real estate. One popular but pricey option is EU Malta’s Citizenship by Naturalization, which requires a $780,000 non-refundable contribution to the economy. Applicants must also pay $52,000 for each qualifying dependent, lease or purchase a property in Malta for six years, and donate to a Maltese charity. All of these options would compete with Trump’s Gold Card for buyers.
Desire for a second passport does not rest with Nigerian princes and Vietnamese oligarchs alone. Many wealthy Americans are in the market (though obviously would not be in the pool for a Trump Gold Card.) Henley & Partners, a law firm specializing in high-net-worth citizenships, said Americans now outnumber every other nationality when it comes to securing alternative residences or added citizenships.
Recent high-profile examples of second citizenships include billionaire Peter Thiel (New Zealand) and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (Cyprus.) The head of private clients at Henley & Partners added “If I’m wealthy, I would like to hedge against levels of volatility and uncertainty. The idea of diversification is well understood by wealthy individuals around what they invest. It makes no sense to have one country of citizenship and residence when I have the ability to actually diversify that aspect of my life as well.
“Globally, millionaire migration was expected to have hit a new high in 2024, as wars, government crackdowns on wealth, and political uncertainty drove more wealthy residents to other countries, with an estimated 128,000 millionaires forecast to move to a new country,” according to Henley. The U.S. remains a top destination for the global wealthy, with an inflow of 2,200 millionaires in 2023 and an estimated 3,500 in 2024. China remains the biggest source of out-migration, losing 13,500 millionaires last year.
So what might this mean for Trump’s Gold Card? There is first of all the problem of getting rid of the creaky EB-5 visa and replacing it with the Gold Card. Trump says an Executive Order will suffice, but most experts agree only Congress can revoke or create new visa categories. Assuming Trump can get past that hurdle (no small task), is his Gold Card in the clear?
On the plus side he is in fact marketing the U.S. as the world’s best destination. While someone may scoop up a Maltese passport for travel convenience, he is unlikely to want to move his fortune there, invest further or set up house. The U.S. is different, and the Gold Card on sale for a single fee, transactional and quick, no risky investing needed, no subjective adjudication. Despite Americans’ fears, the U.S. passport is still one of the most useable in the world, and for the rich, American wealth-creation, education, and medical care rank close to number one. The U.S. is a highly desirable location not just for a convenient passport but as a place of residence.
The problem is price. Trump’s Gold Card, if offered at $5 million, is dramatically more expensive than its competitors. The pool of potential buyers, though not small, is not that deep. Simply put, is the price too high?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump May Succeed Where Others Failed in Personnel Cutting
Disclaimer: Then-Vice President Al Gore awarded my State Department team in Seoul in the mid-90’s a Hammer Award for helping “reinvent government.” Gore was in charge of the Clinton-era plan to create a government that costs less and works better. The plan mostly depended on us run-of-the-mill employees to come up with cost saving hacks and strategies within our own offices.
The award, a mounted gold-painted hammer, was supposed to remind us of the expensive, wasteful procurements by the military, in this case an ashtray that would break into no more than three pieces when hit by a hammer. It’s true! So while as a Gore team award-winner I might seem a bit biased toward what Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing, the truth is actually the opposite. And that’s because one strategy failed while the other still has a decent chance of succeeding.
Trump is far from the first president to want to reform the Federal government. Ronald Reagan in 1982 launched a group led by 150 private sector CEOs to review federal agencies and make recommendations to reduce waste. “Be bold. We want your team to work like tireless bloodhounds. Don’t leave any stone unturned in your search to root out inefficiency,” the president told commission members. Officially called the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control in the Federal Government, it was better known as the Grace Commission after its chair, Peter Grace. Grace was well-known at the time for a speech where he said food stamps were basically a subsidy for Puerto Ricans.
In due time, the Grace Commission issued a report suggesting over 2,500 recommendations to increase government efficiency. Most of them required Congressional action and so in the end not much was done.
As mentioned, led by former Vice President Al Gore, the National Performance Review had similar aims as the Grace Commission, but went about achieving them in a different way. Rather than bringing on private sector outsiders like Reagan, the Clinton administration relied on federal employees. “It is career bureaucrats who know, better than anyone else, what works and what doesn’t,” said a Gore aide. “A successful reform effort cannot take place without their wisdom and without their participation.”
Part of that wisdom was my team out in Seoul. We were then the busiest visa issuing embassy in the world, and were literally struggling for air amid Korean visa applications for travelers to the United States. Our rewarded hammer wisdom was to couple a hiring blitz with a range of kinda-makes-sense administrative changes to our workflow. Because we were processing close to a million visas a year, even small adjustments could have a big impact (a small thing times one million is a big number.) It made it all seem dramatic, and we wrote it up nicely, hence the award from Gore. We hung it on the wall near the restrooms where everyone could see it daily.
Gore’s program got a little help, I mean, besides from my team. Between January 1993 and September 2000, the federal workforce shrunk by 426,200, making it the smallest one since the administration of Dwight Eisenhower. The reduction was brought about through a large-scale buyout program and about 25,000 layoffs. Still, overall only $136 billion was saved and the workforce grew back again under subsequent administrations. A 2013 Government Executive article criticized how the shrinkage was achieved. “The reduction didn’t happen in a way that matched workforce needs because they used a strategy for downsizing to hit a target. The effort got in the way of the ‘making government work better’ piece. Many with special skills left, and people who stayed might have been those we’d have wanted to leave.”
Here’s where with lessons learned Trump may have a chance to succeed where Reagan and Clinton did not.
— No commissions or blue ribbon panels. One of Reagan’s mistakes was to create a commission with the power to peer into all aspects of government without the power to do anything about the problems they uncovered. A report was produced (purposeful use of the passive tense there) and dumped onto Congress’ lap where it slowly faded from memory. Though the wire diagram is a bit fuzzy here in 2025, Elon Musk clearly has more power in his hands than simply to produce a report. His ability to act, whether by ordering in Trump’s name actual de facto closures of agencies like USAID, or by offering government-wide buyouts ahead of a RIF, is significant. That alone may make DOGE more successful than its predecessors.
— Understanding people are the problem, unlike Gore. Gore made the mistake of handing over uncovering waste to the very people perpetuating it, trusting them to hack themselves into efficiency. Musk, instead of encouraging workers to flush out waste, assumes those employees are actually the drivers of it. The hammer this time is a pink slip. Gore did produce some nice optics and had a publicity-forward edge to it all, but resulted in little actual money-saving change or added efficiency. But contrast the media response to Gore’s approach versus Musk’s on-purpose bully-in-a-china shop tactics as an indicator to how long he’ll get away with what he is doing.
— But without some guidance as to who to cut, Musk risks the same problem Reagan and Gore had, throwing out the good, needed employees with the bad ones when the only criteria is headcount. You can bet that nearly every employee inside government is considering how to bail out right now. The problem is that given lucrative government retirement and pension plans, anyone close to “real” retirement is going to try and tough it out. These may not be the best employees, or maybe they are, but they’ll be the ones to cling to their jobs for another six months or a year or whatever. Statistically they are more likely to have a coronary at their desk then to leave without a fight.
The second group of government employees who will hang on like a dog with a turkey leg in its mouth are the worst of the worst, those employees who have no transferable skills into the private sector. They have nowhere to go and nothing to lose and unless identified and micro-targeted by RIFs may be who is left to turn out the lights in many government offices a year or two from now, the true Deep State, dug in even deeper.
Musk needs guidelines in his efforts beyond “move fast and break things” and creating some commission a la Reagan which will spend a year creating a report of little value. With that said, so far so good. Unlike Gore, who also just used crude headcount goals, Musk will need to engage departmental leadership for those agencies he hopes to redeem and make informed choices over which employees to RIF and/or which sub-departments to close. Of course none of that matters if your goal is to delete an entire agency, as with USAID or Education. The wood chipper has its uses, too.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Tough Times at Foggy Bottom
The DOGE tsunami is about to strike the U.S. Department of State, as well as other agencies. Let’s see what that means.
The day the music died was January 28, when nearly everyone at State, along with over two million other federal civilian employees, received an email referring to “A Fork in the Road.” The email offered qualifying diplomats and civil servants a choice ahead of planned Reductions in Force (RIFs, layoffs): resign now under a special program, don’t come to work for a few months while being paid, and then in September become eligible for whatever retirement benefits you would otherwise be eligible for, if any. State offers its diplomats a full retirement with pension after age 50 and 20 years of service, similar to the military, and after 30 years for civil servants, all with exceptions of course.
Despite the general sense the buyout was some sort of trick (workers questioned what legal authority allowed State and other federal agencies to pay people who technically resigned, then bring them back into the system to retire), across the government some 77,000 people signed up for the deal before it was brought to a pause by court action. For those with a long way toward formal retirement, it seemed like good enough; ahead of being RIFed, they’d pocket some seven months’ salary on top of whatever severance package might await them when actually let go. The Fork program, as it was commonly now called (alongside the new expression “to get forked”), acquired a formal name, “deferred resignation,” and the paid time off without working became “administrative leave.” An involuntary retirement is called the Orwellian “Discontinued Service Retirement.”
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and others sued to block the “deferred resignation” program, arguing that its chaotic rollout and shifting legal justifications constituted violations of the Administrative Procedure Act’s protections against “arbitrary and capricious” decision-making, and the promise to pay employees past the March 14 possible government shutdown deadline could constitute an Anti-Deficiency Act violation.
On February 12 the federal judge who had temporarily blocked the plan reversed course, ending the temporary restraining order upon concluding he lacked jurisdiction in the case. The deferred resignations would be allowed to go forward (though the sign up deadline has now passed) reducing head count at State and other federal agencies if everything went as planned. In his decision, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole wrote the unions’ challenges are of the type Congress “intended for review within the statutory scheme,” referring to the need to file administrative appeals before going to court. There were doubts the Trump administration would or legally could follow through as stated. Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, called the plan “an unfunded IOU from Elon Musk.”
Then things started to get really interesting at State.
Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) February 12, stating inter alia “The Secretary [of State] shall, consistent with applicable law, implement reforms in recruiting, performance, evaluation, and retention standards, and the programs of the Foreign Service Institute, to ensure a workforce that is committed to faithful implementation of the President’s foreign policy… In implementing the reforms identified in this section, the Secretary shall, consistent with applicable law, revise or replace the Foreign Affairs Manual and direct subordinate agencies to remove, amend, or replace any handbooks, procedures, or guidance… Failure to faithfully implement the President’s policy is grounds for professional discipline, including separation.”
Many at State read this as implementation of a “loyalty test” for continued employment. The full scope of the EO will depend on the actual steps taken after its signing, especially the admonition to revise or replace the Foreign Affairs Manual, the set of rules State functions under administratively and policy-wise. It could pave the way for a massive restructuring of State, consolidating power under political appointees and away from diplomatic staff.
Then things got really interesting.
Nearly concurrent with the February 12 EO, Foggy Bottom HQ sent out a message to all embassies and consulates warning outposts around the world to start planning for staff reductions, according to ABC News. Senior embassy officials were asked to provide comprehensive lists of all employees and their employment status as part of the process, sources said, explaining the request includes tenured, untenured, and temporary duty assignments. Embassies will be required to cut both American staff and employees hired locally, sources added. The edicts followed a decision by Secretary of State Rubio to not extend contracts for civilian personal services contractors (PSC) who provide housekeeping and maintenance at embassies. But PSCs also supplement diplomatic security; roughly half of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security’s contractors fall under the new directive. Contracts in the process of being signed are to be halted and any job postings made after the inauguration of Donald Trump are to be rescinded. Only State’s domestic passport PSC operations staff are exempted (a smart move in that it limits direct public impact from an otherwise nearly totally foreign-facing organization.)
Trump wasn’t finished. In another EO, he declared “Agency Heads shall promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force (RIFs), consistent with applicable law, and to separate from Federal service temporary employees and reemployed annuitants working in areas that will likely be subject to the RIFs. All offices that perform functions not mandated by statute or other law shall be prioritized in the RIFs, including all agency diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; all agency initiatives, components, or operations that my Administration suspends or closes; and all components and employees performing functions not mandated by statute or other law who are not typically designated as essential during a lapse in appropriations as provided in the Agency Contingency Plans on the Office of Management and Budget website. This subsection shall not apply to functions related to public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement.” The uniformed military and postal service employees are also exempt.
That means State, along with other agencies, is going to have to soon start firing people.
The EO led directly to State’s diplomatic union issuing an urgent message to its members explaining “Agencies have 30 days to submit reorganization plans to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The implementation of these plans will include RIFs. The executive order does not specify when RIFs will begin… Section 611 of the Foreign Service Act allows for RIFs. This section also requires the creation of rules for letting go of career and career candidate members under Chapter 3 of the Act. The regulations note that the retention hierarchy in the event of a RIF should be based on the following: organizational changes; employee knowledge, skills, or competencies; tenure of employment; employee performance, and military preference.”
Regulations allow for 120 days notice to the RIFed employee though note under some special circumstances the notice need be only 30 days. They go on to say while an employee may file a grievance against the RIF, the grievance will not delay separation and is limited only to cases of reprisal, interference in the conduct of the member’s official duties or similarly inappropriate use of RIF authority. The current understanding is that RIFed employees, if otherwise eligible, can receive their retirement pensions. Ineligible RIFed employees will likely lose their healthcare and life insurance as best as things are understood. But this is far from over and no one knows how it will end.
“We do need to delete entire agencies, as opposed to leave part of them behind. Just leave part of them behind. It’s easy. It’s kind of like leaving a weed,” Elon Musk said. “If you don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”
Everything is in flux at present and no one should make any decisions based on this or any other article. But what is clear is that this time Trump means business. Unlike the small-scale RIF which took place at State during the Clinton administration, this time it’s for real, a seemingly determined effort to downsize the State Department both at home and abroad while at the same time likely increasing the authority of political appointees. It is both a paradigm shift and a power shift away from a more-or-less independent State Department (and other agencies) toward a concentration of power deeper inside the Executive Branch.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
USAID: Can It Get Back to Promoting American Soft Power?
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is a Cold War relic that has been allowed to metastasize into some sort of woke monster, racked with corruption as if squandering money grabbed ahold of the organization and shook it like the norovirus. USAID’s time has passed and it deserves the quick death Elon (“feed it into the wood chipper”) Musk seems to have in store for it. But is there a baby in the bathwater to watch out for?
My own experience with USAID was in Iraq some 15 years ago when I led two Provincial Reconstruction Teams there for the State Department. My so-called team of heroes included a contractor representing the vast money pool that was USAID. Then, like now, the USAID money followed America’s foreign adventures; whereas once Iraq was the number one recipient of foreign aid money, today is it Ukraine which is the big winner; in 2023, USAID funding represented approximately 0.7 percent of the U.S. federal budget. In 2021, before the war in Ukraine, it accounted for only about half that.
The USAID rep in Iraq was a nice enough guy — he probably meant well — but it was only later I found out he was so quiet in meetings because he was ordered by USAID higher-ups not to tell anyone at State what he was working on for fear we’d meddle somehow. When a local Iraqi town council complained about a corrupt building contractor siphoning off funds designated for rebuilding homes, the USAID guy swore no knowledge of the project. I knew it was not a State or Army Civil Affairs piece of work, but a little embarrassed checking with the Iraqis (!) revealed it was indeed AID. My efforts to get their Inspector General or even an intern to look into things met with stonewalling until finally I was invited to a nice sit-down lunch at the USAID compound in Baghdad with a senior staffer and told to mind my own business, that no one would be looking into the project, things needed to move ahead, go find something else to do, there was plenty of war around for everyone. The Iraqis, too, learned a valuable lesson in American soft power: the Americans were willing to overlook outright fraud to get a nice photo-op and tic another To-Do box done. That kind of thing was often the case with USAID — things were designed to look good for the head office, not necessarily to benefit anyone on the ground.
Back in 2025 I laughed out loud when I read how USAID funded LGBT plays and transgender comic books and the like, woke little projects that were packaged for Washington not Peru or Guatemala. USAID (and State) did the same in Iraq, only we had not discovered the fertile ground of the LGBT community then; our mid-2000’s version of wokeness was toward women. It was considered part of democracy building that those women throw off their headscarves and rush out to open businesses and vote. So in parallel with USAID we magically tried to create entrepreneurs out of housewives, at least long enough for some photos, and yes, staged a few plays about female empowerment. A special program was devised to tell Iraqi women to vote, and to vote their own opinions not those of their husbands. That might have at least been justifiable if it had worked. It didn’t; it was drawn up in a way to appeal to Washington, not the literal, real-life goatherders who populated our area.
My view of USAID in Iraq was not comprehensive, but confirming. I saw nothing that wasn’t a gross caricature of our foreign policy. Things from 2015 and the goofy woke programs of 2025 are cousins.
So what happened to USAID? The Cold War ended is what. The organization was founded in 1961, near the height of the Cold War, as a way to fight back against the Russians in the developing world. The idea was to push American influence out past the battle lines of the military, past the diplomatic front lines, into the towns and villages of the people we were trying to affect away from similar efforts being made by the Soviets. The most likely American the people would see would not be wearing a green uniform or a cheap blue suit, but instead be providing food, medicine, and schooling for them.
But with the urgency of the Cold War behind it and the New World Order mission muddied, fringe political ideologies were imposed on USAID. The agency’s funding was corrupted, with grants going to radical causes. It became “a shadow government piggy bank for far-left causes.”
Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, knows. “While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements,” he wrote. In 2021, he said the Biden administration used the agency to prop up a communist protest movement in San Salvador to oppose his government. He released WhatsApp messages from administration officials as evidence of the meddling in his country’s democratic process.
Perhaps the best illustration of how USAID has misused its funding, the New York Post reports, is found in the Middle East.
“In 2024, as the region reeled from the aftermath of the bestial atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel the previous year, the United States significantly boosted its financial support for projects in Gaza and the West Bank, spending more than $200 million of American taxpayers’ money in territories already rife with terrorist incitement and activity. The respected Israeli research organization NGO Monitor pointed out that as the U.S. government ‘dramatically increased funding’ for these various projects, it ‘drastically decreased transparency.’ These grants were made to what USAID called ‘miscellaneous foreign awardees.’ You wouldn’t know from the opaque accounting process that beneficiaries included local partners who praised the October 7 onslaught.”
Not comprehensive — it is just one more example — but confirming. There is nothing that isn’t a gross caricature of our foreign policy. The problems with USAID I saw in Iraq a decade and a half ago are the same problems it has today. This is not a hill for Democrats to die on. The agency was long overdue for a gutting, and Musk is the man to do it.
Pointless “democracy initiatives” and woke comic gay books amounted to $1.58 billion of USAID funding in 2023, granted only a small portion of the agency’s $42 billion annual budget. But that attracts outsize attention. The agency in 2023 also provided more than $1.9 billion in food aid. They delivered HIV treatment, maternal care, and combated malaria. America needs these kinds of soft power tools, for their own sake and to compete with growing efforts by China. Critical functions of USAID, Secretary of State Marco Rubio already indicated, will persist. Foreign aid broadly, he stressed, must be “in furtherance of and aligned with the national interest and foreign policy of the United States.” This is similar to what Warren Christopher believed, when he tried unsuccessfully to bring USAID into the State Department during the Clinton administration (so none of this is new, Democrats.) Hopefully those worthwhile programs can be continued under USAID’s new owners at State and the organization, now under the control of Rubio, can get back to its real roots promoting American soft power.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Chinese Baby Factories Exploit Birthright Citizenship
Even before taking office, Trump’s influence is being felt on birthright citizenship. ICE, taking advantage of Biden’s absence as a leader, saw a California man sentenced to over 3 years in prison for running a business called USA Happy Baby that helped pregnant Chinese women travel to the United States to deliver babies who would automatically get American citizenship.
USA Happy Baby helped several hundred women travel from China to give birth to American citizen babies. The “tourists” paid as much as $40,000 for services including apartment rentals during their stays in Southern California and worked with overseas entities that coached women on what to say during visa interviews and upon arriving in U.S. airports, advising them among other things to wear loose clothing to hide their pregnancies.
“For tens of thousands of dollars each, defendant helped his numerous customers deceive U.S. authorities and buy U.S. citizenship for their children,” federal prosecutors wrote in court papers. USA Happy Baby worked with a multi-million dollar adjacent business called You Win USA which further coached pregnant Chinese women on how to get into the United States. Another business, Star Baby Care, boasted of bringing over 8,000 Chinese women to the U.S. to give birth. The businesses operate openly, and advertise freely in Chinese-language media both here and abroad. It is big business. Yet many of the women, lacking U.S. health insurance, gave birth as public charges using public funds.
Such businesses have long operated in California, Florida, and other states and have catered to people not only from China, but also from Russia, Nigeria, Korea, and elsewhere. It isn’t illegal to visit the United States while pregnant, but lying to consular and immigration officials about the reason for travel is when the primary purpose is to give birth in the U.S. is. Birth travel is driven by birthright citizenship, and Donald Trump wants to do away with both of them.
“I see this as a grave national security concern and vulnerability,” said Mark Zito, assistant special agent-in-charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Are some of them doing it for security because the United States is more stable? Absolutely. But will those governments take advantage of this? Yes, they will.”
So what is birthright citizenship? A child born in the United States (with limited exceptions) to a foreign citizen, legally or illegally present in the U.S., is by virtue of the 14th Amendment (the so-called Citizenship Clause) automatically and forever an American citizen. The child need only prove he was born in the U.S. At the age of 21 the child can begin filing green card paperwork for his extended family. The single American citizen in a family becomes the “anchor” through which all can eventually become legal permanent residents of the U.S. and soon after, citizens.
The 14th was adopted in 1868, in the aftermath of the Civil War as part of reconciling the status of millions of slaves brought to the United States. The Citizenship Clause specifically overruled the 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had held that Americans descended from African slaves could not be citizens of the United States. The Amendment cleared up any ambiguities, stating “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The most significant test of the 14th Amendment came in 1898, via United States v. Wong Kim Ark. The Supreme Court upheld a child born in the United States automatically became a U.S. citizen. At issue were laws passed after the Wong child’s birth that excluded Chinese citizens from entering the U.S. The decision in Wong is understood to mean that the legal status of the mother, as well as any secondary immigration laws below the Constitution, have no bearing on the granting of citizenship.
Doing away with birthright citizenship is another of Trump’s proclaimed Day One initiatives. In a campaign post, Trump wrote “On Day One, President Trump will sign an Executive Order to stop federal agencies from granting automatic U.S. citizenship to the children of illegal aliens. It will explain the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment, that U.S. Citizenship extends only to those both born in and ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States.”
The Trump campaign also said it would order on Day One the Social Security Administration to refuse Social Security numbers to newborn children without proof of the parents’ immigration status. Trump will issue the same order to the State Department, which issues U.S. passports. This would not require any action from Congress and because it would not grant/take away citizenship per se, would not directly violate the 14th Amendment in Trump’s interpretation.
Currently, a U.S. birth certificate is all that is needed to obtain a Social Security number and passport in most cases. The State Department considers U.S.-born children of illegal aliens to be subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and thus to have citizenship at birth. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual takes the position Wong settled this issue. This means the Trump E.O. would likely be challenged immediately in lower courts and the case would be ripe for the Supreme Court to use to revisit Wong if they wished to. The Court could rule classes of foreigners on U.S. soil such as tourists (included already are children of foreign diplomats) are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore their children, if born in this country, are not entitled to citizenship. The Court could also side with long precedent and refuse to even hear the case.
Another option for Trump would be to re-issue and this time enforce an Executive Order from Trump 1.0. Under this E.O., visitors can be denied temporary tourist visas if it’s found the “primary purpose” of their travel is to obtain citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States. The rule does not currently apply to the 39 countries in the Visa Waiver Program, including Korea, and State in implementing the E.O. forbids its visa officers from even asking in most cases if an applicant is pregnant, making the order near-impossible to enforce. A revised E.O., which refines “tourism” to exclude planning to give birth in the U.S., extends the exclusion to the Visa Waiver Program, applies equally to ICE at the Ports of Entry, and prohibits the State Department from defanging the law in its implementing guidance, could go a long way toward at least slowing the flood of pregnant visitors to the U.S.
Trump could also order ICE to more aggressively pursue the baby facilitators now actively at work in the U.S., places like USA Happy Baby and You Win USA. ICE could productively look into how the organizations move money internationally, likely to find something akin to money laundering and tax evasion, even if the immigration laws themselves are too weak to hold up in court on a large scale.
What Trump cannot do is wipe away the 14th Amendment, and it is possible his other efforts to slow birth tourism will ultimately fail on this point. Then-House Speaker Paul Ryan in 2018 said “As a conservative, I’m a believer in following the plain text of the Constitution, and I think in this case the 14th Amendment is pretty clear, and that would involve a very, very lengthy constitutional process. But where we obviously totally agree with the president is getting at the root issue here, which is unchecked illegal immigration.”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump versus the Visa Office
For all the emphasis on the southern border and The Wall, asylum procedures and criminal aliens, little ink has been spilled over the other side of immigration, the issuance of visas abroad to foreigners by the Department of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. Literally millions of temporary nonimmigrant visas (tourist visas, students, temporary workers) are issued yearly, many of which go to foreigners who have no intention of ever returning home. They join the millions who flood across the southern border, entering quasi-legally and staying on indefinitely illegally. What reforms are due at State visa offices worldwide?
Project 2025 is harsh towards the State Department in general, citing one study which concluded the department is a “crippled institution suffering from an ineffective organizational structure in which regional and functional policies do not serve integrated goals, and in which sound management, accountability, and leadership are lacking.” The major source of the State Department’s ineffectiveness, Project 2025 believes, lies in its institutional belief “it is an independent institution that knows what is best for the United States, sets its own foreign policy, and does not need direction from an elected President.” Strong medicine.
The Project contains many country-specific and region-oriented policy plans for State to follow to remedy all that. There’s always more to do, of course. For example, it is interesting how many major political events of the last few years crisscrossed the State Department: Hillary Clinton’s emails and Foundation shenanigans, the Steele Dossier and many things Russiagate, and the first impeachment and Ukraine. And never mind two Democratic presidential candidates, Clinton and John Kerry, found a home there. That’s an awful lot of partisanship for an organization which brags about being non-partisan.
Yet for all the policy and institutional changes proposed for State, it is the visa function which Project 2025 singles out as among the most important. The Project says “the department’s most noteworthy challenge on the global stage has been its handling of immigration and domestic security issues, which are inextricably related. The State Department’s apparent posture toward these two issues, which are of paramount importance to the American people, has historically been that they are of lesser importance than other issues and that they can be treated as concessions in broader diplomatic engagements. In other instances in which access to the U.S. in the form of immigrant (permanent) and nonimmigrant (temporary) visas could potentially serve as diplomatic leverage, it is almost never used. To some degree, the State Department and many of its personnel appear to view the U.S. immigration system less as a tool for strengthening the United States and more as a global welfare program. To ensure the safety, security, and prosperity of all Americans, “this must change.” Stronger medicine.
What the Project is getting at is visa issuance is typically divorced from larger policy issues and almost never used as a tool to gain concessions on other issues. It is instead given away, the mantra in the Bureau of Consular Affairs being each visa case is decided individually without reference to larger global issues. Yet in many countries, particularly in the developing world, visas are a form of currency, and possession of a full American tourist visa, or having a son at an American university on a student visa, are treated as much as a sign of wealth and status as a nice home or an imported car.
Upstairs in an embassy the ambassador and his staff may fret about trade deficits while downstairs in the Consular Section visa candy is handed out to locals as if nothing is the matter. Project 2025 wants this “Chinese Wall” knocked down. It would question why the U.S. imposes significant tariffs on China with one hand to pressure the CCP, while freely handing out 64,187 multi-year tourist visas in the month of September 2024 (latest statistics) alone. Similar statistics belie the leverage wasted in Russia (3,552 tourist visas monthly), Mexico (over 186,000 border crossing documents) and against Iran (1,092 tourist visas) just as examples. In most non-developed nations the burden of some sort of visa pressure would fall nearly completely on the elite as far as tourist visas, or on important companies with juice with their own governments in other cases (over 3,000 temporary worker visas were issued in China.) Exceptions could always be made for compelling American interests, such as Google’s or Microsoft’s H1-B workers. It would just drive home the point of using visas as a negotiating tool, as Project 2025 envisions.
For example, one could imagine the impact of withholding visa issuances on Central American nations unwilling to cooperate with the U.S. on returning migrants, or a recalcitrant Mexico looking at the “Remain in Mexico” plan likely to be a Day One proposal from the Trump administration.
Project 2025 also calls for the evaluation of national security–vulnerable visa programs to protect the American people. The State Department should evaluate several key security-sensitive visa programs it manages. These include the Diversity Visa program, the F (student) visa program, and J (exchange visitor) visa program. The State Department’s evaluation must “ensure that these programs are not only consistent with White House immigration policy, but also align with its national security obligations and resource limitations.”
Following the events of 9/11 a massive overhaul was done to the visa issuing system, and numerous steps were added to the process. These include fingerprinting and photographing all applicants, and coordinating file checks among State and the intelligence agencies. Supporters point to the apparent success of the program — no additional 9/11’s — but Project 2025 calls for a more detailed answer. The threat still remains — the U.S. issued over 1,000 student visas to Saudis in July 2024, 32 to Yemenis, and 338 to Iranians.
But in addition to the broader security questions about student visa issuance addressed by Project 2025, there lurks the individual case questions and whether or not these will be folded into the individual visa decision. For example, how many of those Iranian or Saudi student visas are issued to students planning to study STEM fields applicable to nuclear engineering? Such data are unavailable. While some cumbersome speed bumps for that sort of thing exist in the current system, State visa officers are not empowered, never mind not encouraged, to refuse such cases outright at first glance on national interest grounds in alignment with national security obligations. It ain’t rocket science, people.
Project 2025 seeks such change, change which will require serious new thinking in the Bureau of Consular Affairs and closer coordination between Consular and the so-called “political” side of State. State may have held paid “crying sessions” after Trump’s election win, but it looks like the tears are just getting ready to get started.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Somebody is in Trouble Over Afghanistan
Boy oh boy, if anyone looks seriously into the end game in Afghanistan is somebody gonna be in trouble. See, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) the collapse of the Afghan army and government was mostly our own fault. No dessert for you!
You remember the war in Afghanistan, don’t you? Anyone? Bueller? See it was America’s longest war, stretching from 2001 until 2021, long enough that soldiers who deployed near the end had not even been born when it all started. Now that’s a war! The thing is, the war accomplished nothing in its 20 years. The situation on the ground — Taliban in charge, open territory for any terrorist needing an AirBnB — is pretty much status quo September 2001 except it is now 2024.
And now it turns out that’s mostly our fault. SIGAR released its report, Collapse of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces: An Assessment of the Factors That Led to Its Demise. It posits two major factors that lead to the demise: unclear U.S. war aims, and corruption and mismanagement on the part of the Afghan government created, advised, and funded by the U.S. (so that’s sorta on us, too.) General James Mattis, who served as Mad Dog, head of Central Command from 2010 to 2013, and as Secretary of Defense from 2017 to 2018, told SIGAR, “The lack of political clarity on ends, ways, and means meant we were always wondering if we were still going to be here next year. Were we going to be funded next year? We weren’t sure whether to attack, retreat or go sideways.”
SIGAR found that the single most important factor in the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces’ (ANDSF) collapse in August 2021 was the decision by two U.S. presidents to withdraw U.S. military and contractors from Afghanistan, while Afghan forces remained unable to sustain themselves. One former U.S. commander in Afghanistan told SIGAR, “We built that army to run on contractor support. Without it, it can’t function. When the contractors pulled out, it was like we pulled all the sticks out of the jenga pile and expected it to stay up.” The sad-great thing about those quotes is that they could have been applied at most any point in the 20 year war. Lack of political clarity? It was a couple of years into the war itself before anyone knew the reason for the war (it turned out to be “terrorism.”) An unstainable Afghan military? Maybe someone could point out where in say year 16 the army was sustainable. Boy, heads are gonna roll over that one! All we need to do is find out who was responsible for creating a sustainable army and political clarity and roast ’em.
The other factor which contributed to the demise of the Afghan army was the last-minute wholesale restructuring of Afghanistan’s security institutions. In 2021, amid rapidly deteriorating security, President Ghani reshuffled most of his security officials, often replacing them with fellow ethnic Pashtuns. These leadership changes were part of a broader pattern of politicization and ethnicization (in favor of Pashtuns) of the security sector in the final years of the Ghani administration.
One analyst told SIGAR, “Districts collapsed not because of the army, but because of that restructuring that happened and the fact that none of [the replacement police chiefs] had connections” at the district level. He claimed it was the police that did most of the fighting in the final 18 months, not the army. By undermining the morale and political legitimacy of the police, this restructuring directly contributed to the collapse in August 2021. Ethnic competition between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns was likely the single biggest source of dysfunction within the ANDSF. But some former Afghan officials described other types of friction. One former MOD official described competition between the younger and older generation of officers, between the jihadis and the professional officers, and between ethnicities. All these issues distracted from the fight, he said. Now, see, someone on the American side should have been watching for that!
This strategic level mismanagement had a direct effect in the field. “Overnight, 98 percent of U.S. air strikes had ceased… the Doha agreement’s psychological implication was so great that the average Afghan soldier felt this idea of abandonment… U.S. soldiers were confused about what to engage and what to not. On an hourly basis, the U.S. military had to coordinate with the Doha office of Ambassador Khalilzad and others from the State Department to get clarification on what they could do,” said one former Afghan Army corps commander. “They [U.S. partners] said it was not right, but they have to follow orders. They would see the Taliban attacking our checkpoints. They would have videos of the Taliban doing it. But they would say we are not able to engage, because we have limitations. There was also so much concern about civilians, which gave the Taliban an advantage,” explained a former Afghan Army General.
According to an senior Afghan official, it was not until President Biden’s April 2021, announcement of the final troop and contractor withdrawal date that Afghan President Ghani’s inner circle said they realized that the ANDSF had no supply and logistics capability. Although the Afghan government had operated in this way for nearly 20 years, their realization came only four months before its collapse.
Then there was the lack of coordination between the U.S. and the Afghan governments as the Americans negotiating in Doha cut their own deals with the Taliban to enable a quick exit. One former Afghan government official told SIGAR that following the U.S.-Taliban agreement, President Ghani began to suspect that the United States wanted to remove him from power. That official and a former Afghan general believed Ghani feared a military coup. According to the general, Ghani became a “paranoid president… afraid of his own countrymen” and of U.S.-trained Afghan officers. According to a former Afghan general, in the week before Kabul fell, President Ghani replaced the new generation of young U.S.-trained Afghan officers with an old guard of Communist generals in almost all of the army corps. Ghani, that general said, was “changing commanders constantly [to] bring back some of the old-school Communist generals who [he] saw as loyal to him, instead of these American-trained young officers who he [mostly] feared.”
Afghan officials, largely removed from the negotiations, struggled most of all to understand what the United States had agreed to with the Taliban. According to Afghan government officials, the U.S. military never clearly communicated the specifics of its policy changes to the Ghani administration. According to a former Afghan general, in a broad sense, the U.S. military took on the role of a referee and watched the Afghan government and Taliban fight, something the general referred to as “a sick game.” According to that general, Afghan troops had not only lost U.S. support for offensive operations, they no longer knew if or when U.S. forces would come to their defense. U.S. inaction fueled mistrust among the ANDSF toward the United States and their own government. The Taliban’s operations and tactics, however, suggested that they may have had a better understanding of new levels of support the United States was willing to provide to the ANDSF following the signing of the U.S.-Taliban agreement. For example, under the U.S.-Taliban agreement’s rules, U.S. aircraft could not target the Taliban groups that were waiting more than 500 meters away—the groups “beyond the contact” that would engage in the second, third, or fourth wave to defeat the last ANDSF units. A senior Afghan official said this was a loophole that the Taliban used in their targeting to their advantage.
SIGAR’s sad conclusion to the report could have been written at any point, including in 1968. “The U.S. approach to reconstructing the ANDSF lacked the political will to dedicate the time and resources necessary to reconstruct an entire security sector in a war-torn and impoverished country. As a result, the U.S. created an ANDSF that could not operate independently, milestones for ANDSF capability development were unrealistic, and the eventual collapse of the ANDSF was predictable. After 20 years of training and development, the ANDSF never became a cohesive, substantive force capable of operating on its own. The U.S. and Afghan governments share in the blame. Neither side appeared to have the political commitment to doing what it would take to address the challenges, including devoting the time and resources necessary to develop a professional ANDSF, a multi-generational process. In essence, U.S. and Afghan efforts to cultivate an effective and sustainable security assistance sector were likely to fail from the beginning.”
“Likely to fail from the beginning” is a helluva epitaph for U.S. policy in Afghanistan. If only SIGAR could find the guys responsible, we might avoid another round in Ukraine, where our policy depends on another U.S. patsy leader whose army is now totally dependent on U.S. funding, supplies, and advisement in a war that cannot be won, only sustained at great expense.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Ukraine War is Just About Over
The handwriting was on the wall. An Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled “I’m a Ukrainian, and I Refuse to Compete for Your Attention” summed things up nicely: a media junket the author’s friend had been organizing to Ukraine was canceled. The TV crew instead left for the Middle East.
The United States controls how the war in the Ukraine proceeds and always has. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said it was the American side which scuttled any chance of peace in Ukraine as early as March 2022, soon after the war began. “The only people who could resolve the war over Ukraine are the Americans. During the peace talks in March 2022 in Istanbul, Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to. They had to coordinate everything they talked about with the Americans first. However, nothing eventually happened. My impression is that nothing could happen because everything was decided in Washington.”
Fast-forward to 2023 and the story is different. Earlier this month NBC News quietly released a report which said U.S. and European officials broached the topic of peace negotiations with Ukraine, including “very broad outlines of what Ukraine might need to give up to reach a deal with Russia.” NBC said “the discussions are an acknowledgment of the dynamics militarily on the ground in Ukraine and politically in the U.S. and Europe.” They began amid concerns the war has reached a stalemate and about the ability to continue providing open-ended aid to Ukraine. Biden administration officials are also worried Ukraine is running out of men in this war of attrition, while Russia has a seemingly endless supply. Ukraine is also struggling with recruiting and recently saw public protests (not shown on American TV) about President Volodymyr Zelensky’s open-ended conscription requirements. Kiev is today sending 40 and 50-year-olds to the front.
This comes as Time reported Zelensky’s top advisers admitted the war is currently unwinnable for Ukraine. Things look a bit better from the point of view of Ukraine commander-in-chief General Valery Zaluzhny, who believes the war is only at a stalemate. “It’s now a battle of inches,” say American sources quietly.
Americans will be forgiven if they never hear this bad news, never mind be surprised by it if they did. The narrative which drove sports teams to wear blue and yellow patches and E Street Band member Steve Van Zandt to paint his guitar the Ukrainian colors was simple. Amid a flood of propaganda, the story was always the same: Ukraine was pushing back the Russians with weapons provided by a broad range of agreeable NATO benefactors. Between Ukrainian jet fighter aces with improbable kill ratios to patriotic female sniper teams with improbable hair and makeup, Russia was losing. It would be a difficult but noble slog for “as long as it takes” to drive the Russians out. Any talk about peace was insulting to Kiev, fighting for its survival and all. Meanwhile mediagenic President Zelensky at first flew around the world like the anti-Christ Bono, procuring weapons while showing off his man-to-man relationships with celebrities. Now desperate, Zelensky is inflight claiming Russia, Iran, and North Korea sponsored Hamas’ attack on Israel, trying to rattle up some support.
It was as compelling as it was untrue. Any thoughtful analysis of the war showed it to be, from early days, a war of attrition at best for the Ukrainian side and while the U.S. could supply nearly bottomless cargo planes full of weapons and munitions, right up to the promised F-16 fighter-bombers and M1A tanks due on line soon, it could not fill the manpower gap. Any appetite for American troop involvement was hushed up early in the fight. Russia could do what she had always done at war, hunker down in the field and reach deep into its vast territory to find ever more conscripts to wait out the enemy. It didn’t hurt that Russia’s capability versus NATO equipment was surprisingly good, or perhaps the Ukrainians’ handling of sophisticated Western arms was surprisingly bad.
But the most predictable factor leading to quiet U.S. moves toward some sort of “solution” in Ukraine is as predictable as the battlefield results. There is unease in the U.S. government over how much less public attention (despite the propaganda) the war in Ukraine has garnered since the Israeli-Hamas conflict began more than a month ago. Combined with what looks like a feisty new Speaker of the House seeking to decouple aid to Israel from aid to Ukraine, officials fear that shift could make securing additional funds for Kiev difficult.
Americans, the people and their government, assisted by their media wielding the greatest propaganda tools ever imagined, seem capable of focusing on only one bright shiny object at a time. Over 41 percent of Americans now say the U.S. is doing too much to help Kiev. That’s a significant change from just three months ago when only 24 percent of Americans said they felt that way. In the case of wars, a new bright shiny object must include two clear sides, one good and one pure evil, with one preferably an underdog, daily combat footage which can be obtained without too much danger, and a football game-like progression across a map that is easy to follow. It should not be boring. Ukraine was such a conflict and enjoyed almost a full two-year run. But the fickle attention of America shifted to the Middle East just as things started to look more and more like static WWI trench warfare in Ukraine. It was a hard act to follow but something always follows nonetheless (the same calculus works for natural disasters and mass shootings, which are only as mediagenic-good as the next one coming.)
Ukraine, like Israel, owes most of its continued existence to American weaponry. However, despite the blue and yellow splattered on social media at present, Ukraine does not have anywhere near the base of support Israel does among the American public and especially within the American Congress. The terms for resolving the war will be dictated to Kiev as much by Washington as they will be by Moscow, as with Crimea a few years ago. The end will be quite sad; Russia will very likely solidify its hold on Donbas and the Crimea, and achieve new territory to the west approaching Kiev, roughly 20 percent of Ukraine. Ukraine will be forced to set aside its goal of joining NATO even as the U.S. takes a new stand on its western border with Poland.
It is all something of a set piece. America’s habit of wandering into a conflict and then losing interest is long (Iraq) enough to count as an addition to history (Afghanistan.) “We have your back” and “we will not abandon you” join “the check’s in the mail” and “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” among joking faux reassurances. Our proxies seem to end up abandoned and hung out to die. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, never mind Vietnam before that, what was realized at the end could have most likely been achievable at pretty much anytime after the initial hurrahs passed away. It is sad that so many had to die to likely see it happen in 2023.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Talk to the American People about Ukraine, Joe
America needs to hear from its own president, not Volodymyr Zelensky, about what is going on in Ukraine.
America just can’t get enough of Endless War it seems; otherwise why would it keep getting into one of them? Leaving aside ancient historical examples like Korea (still ongoing) and Vietnam (result was a complete defeat of the U.S. after decades of conflict preceeded by years of U.S. nearly completely funding the failed French war effort there) we have the more modern examples of Iraq and Afghanistan. The former sputtered to defeat for the U.S. after decades of war (counting Gulf War I and the bombing campaigns which accomplished little permanently and Gulf War II which led to empowering Iran in Iraq via Gulf War 2.5) and the latter concluding decisively on the TV August 2021 with the symbolically cluster-futzed final evacuation (memories of Saigon.) Each war started with no real practical goal in mind (remember nation building? The War on Terror, i.e., a war against a tactic?)
With that kind of track record you’d think America would take a breather from Endless War, you know, take a few years off to get its head together, maybe work the fentanyl problem, get the economy together so people other than Democratic commentators can see it growing. But no. Just a scant six months after hosing the last Afghan dust off our boots the U.S. finds itself mired in Ukraine. No clear, realistic goal? Check. Open-ended commitment of U.S. resources? Check. Potential to suck U.S. forces directly into the conflict? Check. Dubious one man celebrity leader? Check. Unclear as hell how Ukraine fits into our national interest, how much more time and money will be expected to achieve whatever our objectives are, and how much Europe plans to contribute to the war taking place in its backyard? Check.
It is time for President Biden to explain some things to the American people.
1) What is the endgame, Joe? Is it democracy in Ukraine? If so, you’re off to a rough start. Zelensky over the past two years conscripted his own citizens, kept young males from the freedom to travel, done away with opposition parties, canceled all future elections indefinitely, consolidated all TV platforms in Ukraine into one state broadcast, dealt harshly with dissidents, and assumed practically one-man rule over the nation, certainly its war. Plus there’s all that about units of the Ukrainian military being actual Nazis. So Joe, what is the plan to bring democracy to Ukraine? It seems only that things have gotten worse since the U.S. intervened to prevent the Russians from doing many of the things Zelensky has already done to his own country. FYI Joe, you’ll recall military imposition of democratic values historically has failed.
2) Or Joe, is the point of the war to force Russia out of what Ukraine claims as its territory? Does that include the territory the U.S. gifted a few years ago to the Russians in the Crimea when under another president all this seemed much less dire? Or just to retake the land back which Russia gained after February 2022? That was the point of the Great 2023 Spring Counter-Offensive, right? Be up front with the propaganda-weary American people about how things are going; the Ukrainians in their offensive using most of the conventional ground-force arms in America’s arsenal, gained back only 143 square miles. The Russians, supposedly on the defensive, gained 331 square miles of land. With the Counter-Offensive now clearly a failure, what is the next step? Is there a plan? How do we define win? “As long as it takes” is not a viable option, it’s just a recipe for another Vietnam, another Afghanistan.
3) What role if any will diplomacy with Russia play in achieving this end game, whatever it is? Have the Russians sought to meet and discuss the war? Has the U.S. offered to meet? If not, why not? Diplomacy can end wars. We know your secretary of state can pick a fight but can he stop one, the real test for his profession? Because it is complicated, we’ll give you a pass on how our own government helped create this situation in the first place, something the American people need to know more about at some point.
4) Speaking of things the American public needs to know about, who blew up the Nordstrom pipeline between Russia and Germany? Is this the kind of war America is in that we would blow up the pipeline to press Germany to further join the fight? Or is it the kind of war where Ukraine would somehow muster the technical know-how to blow up the pipeline to force Germany to further join the fight? Why would the Russians blow up a pipeline that supplies their gas to Germany, a significant source of revenue? Is this war that dirty?
5) The U.S. has appropriated $113 billion dollars to Ukraine, paying for everything from tanks to ambulance drivers’ regular salaries. And what else Joe? What systems are in place for accountability for this money? Could it be that more money simply deepens the quagmire and pushes us closer to direct conflict with Russia? You’ve spoken in the past how accountability lies with the Inspectors General at the Department of Defense, State, and USAID. They point to “a decade of shared experience gained from joint oversight of eight different overseas contingency operations, forgetting the spectacular failure of oversight of these overseas contingency operations,” and how the same agencies covered up waste, fraud, and mismanagement and deliberately mislead the American public on the progress made in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Joe, you need to address opposition to the more formal structure of establishing a Special Inspector General for Ukraine (SIGUR), such as SIGIR in Iraq and SIGAR in Afghanistan. “As much as it takes” is a blank check the American taxpayer needs to know more about. Senator Rand Paul in the spring placed a temporary hold on a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, demanding unsuccessfully Congress insert a provision into the aid package creating an inspector general to oversee the distribution of the aid. As SIGAR noted, “While Afghanistan and Ukraine are very different countries with a history of facing very different threats, many of the challenges U.S. agencies faced in Afghanistan—coordinating efforts, dealing with corruption, and effectively monitoring and evaluating projects and programs—will be the same as the ones they will face in Ukraine.” And speaking of corruption, your own State Department has singled out Ukraine for its corrupt practices, which as you know from Iraq and Afghanistan will seriously dilute any aid. Why resist additional oversight?
6) We know there are American Special Forces on the ground in Ukraine, and America forces in command and control roles in the ongoing fight. Are there redlines, either promised to Zelensky or just for yourself, Joe, to trigger a larger U.S. direct role in Ukraine? What would it take to have more “advisers” on the ground, or American air power, or American leadership embedded with Ukrainian troops in the field? At what point in escalation would you agree Congress needs to formally weigh in? And no fair making it all OK by calling the deployments “NATO” instead of American. A Russia-NATO scuffle is a Russia-U.S. scuffle.
No more malarkey, Joe. Time to talk to the American people about Ukraine.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Embassy Evacuation: Sudan
The American Embassy in Sudan is closed. Fierce fighting between two warring generals has led to the swift deterioration of conditions in the capital and the U.S. appears to be preparing to evacuate American staff, possibly some private American citizens. What happens when an embassy is evacuated? What happens to private Americans in-country?
The decision to close an embassy rises to the Secretary of State for approval. An embassy evacuation really is a virtual chess match that some State Department critics say is as much about political signals as it is about the safety of America’s diplomats. In cases where the United States decides to support the host government or in the case of Sudan, one faction, an embassy closure cuts off most interaction and will eliminate on-the-ground reporting. An evacuation can trigger the fall of the host government based on the perceived loss of American confidence, or may encourage rebels to attack private American citizens seen as less-protected. In that one point of having an embassy at all is symbolism, closure is without a doubt a political act. Reopening the embassy brings up all those factors in reverse.
The mechanics of closing an embassy follow an established process, with only the time line varying.
All embassies have standing evacuation procedures, called the Emergency Action Plan, that are updated regularly. A key component is the highly-classified “trip wires,” designated decision points. If the rebels advance past the river, take steps A-C. If the host government military is deserting, implement steps D and E, and so forth.
Early actions include moving embassy dependents out of the country via commercial flights. The embassy in Sudan is designated a partially accompanied post. This means that while some family members may be permitted to accompany U.S. government employees to the post, there are restrictions on who can accompany them and for how long. In addition, incoming staff can be held in Washington and existing tours cut short. Non-essential official personnel (for example, the trade attaché, who won’t be doing much business in the midst of coup) are flown out. A “Do Not Travel” public advisory (note item 8, “prepare a will”) must be issued by the State Department to private American citizens under the “No Double Standard” rule. This grew out of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of a Pan Am flight, where inside threat info was made available to embassy families but kept from the general public.
These embassy draw-down steps are seen as low-cost moves, both because they use commercial transportation, and because they usually attract minimal public attention both inside and outside the host country.
The next steps typically involve the destruction of classified materials. The flood of sensitive documents stolen from the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 remains a sore point inside State even today. Classified materials include mountains of paper that need to be shredded, pulped or burnt, as well as electronics, weapons, encryption gear, and hard drives that must be physically destroyed. Embassies estimate how many linear feet of classified paper they have on hand and the destruction process begins in time (one hopes) to destroy it all.
Somewhere in the midst of all this, the Marines come into the picture. Embassies are guarded only by a small, lightly armed detachment of Marines. As part of their standard Special Operation Capable (SOC) designation, larger Marine units train with their SEAL components for the reinforcement and evacuation of embassies. They maintain libraries of overhead imagery and blueprints of diplomatic facilities to aid in planning. Fully combat-equipped Marines can be brought into the embassy, either stealthily to avoid inflaming a tense situation, or very overtly to send a message to troublemakers to back off. Long experience keeps Marine assets handy to the Middle East and Africa. Any evacuation out of Sudan will flow from the large U.S. military facility nearby in Djibouti, and so the Pentagon is moving more troops to the African nation to prepare for a possible evacuation of staff in Sudan. The U.S. will often coordinate its evacuation with other nations’, with friendlies such as Canada, and in places where another nation’s influence is strong, such as in Francophone Africa.
What is done to support private American citizens varies considerably (there are some 19,000 in Sudan.) The rule of thumb is if a commercial means of departure exists, private citizens must utilize it, sometimes with the assistance of the embassy. Loans for tickets can be made, convoys organized, and so forth. In cases where the major airlines refuse to fly but the airport is still usable, the State Department can arrange charters. Right now the international airport in Khartoum is the target of heavy shelling, with destroyed planes on the tarmac. Sudan’s air space is also closed.
In extreme cases only (Sudan may become such a case) the Marines conduct a Noncombatant Evacuation Order (NEO) to pull citizens out of the country using military assets. At times Americans are simply told to “shelter in place” and ride out a crisis. State will ask a neutral embassy in-country, such as the Swiss, to look after them to the extent possible if our own embassy closes.
The current guidance issued to private Americans in Sudan is dire: “U.S. citizens are strongly advised to remain indoors, shelter in place until further notice, and avoid travel to the U.S. embassy. There continues to be ongoing fighting, gunfire, and security forces activity. There have also been reports of assaults, home invasions, and looting. The U.S. embassy remains under a shelter in place order and cannot provide emergency consular services. Due to the uncertain security situation in Khartoum and closure of the airport, it is not currently safe to undertake a U.S. government-coordinated evacuation of private U.S. citizens.”
Almost always left out of the mix are the embassy local staff, the cooks, drivers, and translators. Rarely are they evacuated, and are usually left to make their own way in what can be a very dangerous environment for someone seen as an American collaborator. Some have compared this to the poor treatment military translators from Iraq and Afghanistan received trying to secure visas to the United States.
Images of an empty embassy are not what the American government looks forward to seeing spreading across social media. The pieces are in place in Sudan, waiting for the situation on the ground to dictate what happens next.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Iraq War Anniversary
This week marks the 20th anniversary of Iraq War 2.0. The date is worthy of some reflection.
I was part of the war, heading two embedded civilian provincial reconstruction teams (ePRTs) 2009-2010 and wrote a book critical of the program, We Meant Well, for which was I was punished into involuntary retirement by my employer the U.S. State Department. The working title for the book was originally “Lessons for Afghanistan from the Failed Reconstruction of Iraq” and was meant to explain how our nation building efforts failed to accomplish anything except setting afire rampant corruption, and how repeating them nearly dollar-for-dollar in the Afghan theatre was just going to yield the same results. After all, isn’t one definition of madness doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results?
Between 2003 and 2014, more than $220 billion was wasted on the effort to rebuild Iraq. In the end, the sum was we accomplished worse than nothing. Iraq before our invasion(s) was a more or less stable place, good enough that Saddam was even an ally of sorts during the Iraq-Iran War. By the time we were finished Iraq was a corrupt client state of Iran. Where once most literate Americans knew the name of the Iraqi Prime Minister, a regular White House guest, unless he’s changed his name to Zelensky nobody cares anymore.
But today I reflect on another war anniversary, its sixth, which I spent in Iraq. There were no parties, nothing official to mark the day as any different from any other day, hot and dusty with a slight chance of being killed.
We had not always gotten along, the four of us, arguing over what the right thing to do was, how best to get through our year. We moved gracelessly to a small patio near our office, outlined by a CONEX shipping container on one side, a sloppy brick wall standing because it was too lazy to fall on a second, and the remnants of another building on the third. Usually when we came back with our secreted beer from the Embassy (as State Department employees, we did not fall under the military’s General Order No. 1 forbidding alcohol) we parceled the cans out in ones and twos, trying to make the stash last longer, like teens in our parents’ basement. A can tonight, maybe two on Friday, and a couple of cases could pass the time for weeks.
But tonight, maybe in honor of the anniversary, something unspoken made us greedy. We chugged cans, we popped the tops of the ever-warmer brew (room temperature was 104 degrees) and slurped the foam like Vikings on a New World bender. One of the benefits of not drinking often was that your body dried out, and so even a little alcohol thrown down that dry hole kicked your butt. A lot of alcohol drunk purposely under these conditions sent four adults into drunkenness, marvelously rich and fine. It tasted of a high school summer.
With a lot of dust in the air and only a toenail clipping shaped moon out, the darkness was complete as we sat drinking the last. A light would have embarrassed us. Seen in a photo, we could have been anywhere, there were no clues for an outsider to decode. We four felt closer to this place, and to one another, than we had ever had.
The long days at the Embassy for meetings where we had been laughed at as Country Cousin Muggles, unworthy, the warm beer, and the blanket of the dark, led to stories. With the exception of a long, wandering tale that had something to do with a tree, the Germans, and a lawsuit, we had all heard the drunken stories before. The two divorces, a daughter who did not write, the woman whose name had been forgotten even as the teller spent ten minutes describing how her shoes looked next to his bed—the stories all poured out in equal measure to what we poured down our throats. Some were bitter (the sum of our ages totaled over 200; nation-building was not a young man’s game), most more matter of fact. A lifetime of experiences, a thousand autumns, all tied up in those voices.
We realized, maybe for the first time, that we had more in common than we had differences. Like every dog year equaling seven human ones, time spent together in Iraq fast-forwarded how you felt about the people sharing it with you. Nobody cursed Iraq or the anniversary—on the contrary, though none of us could walk a straight line to save his life, we were sharply aware that it was only because we were in Iraq that we could share what we were sharing. There was little talk of the routines of home that used to govern our lives, mortgages, Saturday morning chores and errands. That happened only at the beginning of your time, when you could still smell home on your shirt, or at the end of a tour when you had to will yourself to remember so you could try to fit back in.
The talk instead was about people, friends, lovers, girlfriends, wives, Dads; what we did not have here and for whom we all accepted one another as surrogates. Maybe because we were drunk, we recognized we cared about each other, our differences not resolved but perhaps more vital, dispelled temporarily.
The next morning I awoke with a vicious headache and the realization that someday I would come to miss being with those men as much as I now missed the smell of pillows on my bed at home, or kissing my wife when we both tasted of coffee. It was already over 100 degrees, a Thursday, if I remember it right.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Iran’s Foreign Policy: A Complex Landscape
The Nation asked of President Joe Biden “Is America back?” If it is, what is its signature accomplishment, the marker that Pax Americana or something similar worthy of Latin, is back?
Certainly nothing here at home. Gas flutters at record levels, as much as $5 a gallon in places with all the side effects of higher grocery prices and supply chain missteps. Employment-wise, jobs of some sort are there but lack in quality and salary such that many people find unemployment a better deal than underemployment.
Abroad Biden stretched NATO to its threads by threatening Ukrainian membership in the alliance, and ignoring objections to the alliance’s expansion across Russia’s political spectrum, contributing to an invasion few thought would happen and no one in the West outside of Washington wanted. The result is increasingly divided “allies” and massive expenses in arms and lives without much of a defined endgame. This foreign policy disaster-in-progress stands next to Biden’s other signature foreign policy action, withdrawal from Afghanistan in a haphazard way such that it displayed America’s confusion and fugue state more than its power. The world outside the Beltway seems well aware the outcome of more than 20 years of war and occupation is to return the country to its pre-September 11 state of medieval feudalism even if we chose not to talk much about it here at home.
That’s not much to run on for the second term Biden all but announced his candidacy for in his State of the Union address. Hopes to make better progress here at home are dependent mostly on factors outside America’s control, to include the price of oil (thanks to a Saudi Arabia who brushed back Biden) and any return of Covid. Biden needs and might just be able to find a way to make peace with Iran, however, and score a major foreign policy victory, the kind of typical second term action he could pack into the end of his first term. The world might just forgive some sins (the return of U.S.. forces to Somalia and the endless war in Yemen the U.S. supports, for example) if it sees somnolent American diplomacy dragged out of the closet after six years and put back to use. America’d be back.
The obstacles to some sort of agreement with Iran are formidable. Iran’s own foreign policy goals are nearly as mixed up as America’s, with the country’s leaders pursuing a complex and often contradictory set of objectives. From supporting armed groups in the Middle East to engaging in negotiations with the West, Iran’s approach to foreign affairs has been shaped by a variety of factors, including its history, ideology, and geopolitical interests. To achieve any sort of agreement, Biden would have to navigate all of the above.
One of the most notable aspects of Iran’s foreign policy is its support for armed groups in the region. Iran has long been accused of backing militant organizations, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, as part of its efforts to project power and influence beyond its borders. This has led to increased tensions with Iran’s neighbors, particularly Israel, and has fueled concerns about the country’s intentions in the region. Iran controls Iraq (another American foreign policy blunder, about half of which was under Biden’s vice-watch) and complicates Syria and Yemen. But the complexity of the problem just adds to the value to a solution if it can be found.
Another key aspect of Iran’s foreign policy is its relationship with the West, a fork in the road Biden has the most influence on. The country has been under international sanctions for decades, with the United States and its allies seeking to pressure Iran to limit its nuclear program and curb its support for armed groups (how’s that sanctions regime been working out?) After negotiations with the West during the end state Obama administration, including the 2015 nuclear deal, lifted some of the sanctions in exchange for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, the deal went south, the United States reimposed most sanctions, and Iran has responded by resuming some of its nuclear activities, leading to fears of a wider conflict.
Iran’s foreign policy is shaped by its self-understanding it is a major player in the Middle East, something the U.S. has been very slow to acknowledge. The country has long sought to be a regional power, and has used its military, economic, and political leverage to advance its interests in the region, most notably securing a client state in Iraq. This has led to increased tensions with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, which view Iran as a major threat to their security. But wouldn’t it be a nice gesture to the Saudi’s, who raised oil prices and refuse to crank up production to match that lost in the Ukraine war, to see the U.S. sit down with one of its adversaries?
So what would it take for Biden to make some sort of deal with Iran?
Sanctions relief: Iran would likely seek relief from the economic sanctions that have been imposed on the country, while the U.S. would want to ensure that any sanctions relief is conditional and proportional to Iran’s compliance with the terms of the deal. This is tricky business, but was more or less done in 2015 and is the actual stuff of diplomacy. The economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other countries have had a significant impact on Iran’s economy, reducing its ability to access the global financial system, sell oil, and purchase from other countries. This has led to a shortage of foreign currency, inflation, and a decline in living standards for many Iranians. Biden would have to make clear Iran can choose to be a threshold nuclear power and suffer indefinitely for it, or rejoin the global system and profit from it.
Nuclear restrictions: Both sides would need to agree on the extent to which Iran’s nuclear program should be restricted and monitored, including limitations on uranium enrichment and the size of its nuclear stockpile. Again, mostly taken care of in 2015. Biden would need to fend off Israel entreaties to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities rather than trust Tehran to disarm them. Iran at the negotiation table would likely demand some sort of pullback of Israeli nukes from the Gulf.
Timelines: A clear timeline for lifting sanctions and implementing restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program is important to avoid stalling the agreement.
Verification mechanisms: Both sides would need to agree on the mechanisms for verifying compliance with the terms of the deal, including regular inspections and monitoring.
Regional involvement: As the situation in the Middle East is complex, regional actors, such as the Gulf countries, would need to be involved in the negotiations and have their concerns addressed. This is likely the most difficult part of the deal, bringing the regional actors into line, something a weakened America may not have the diplomatic cojones to make happen. Yemen however is a possible bargaining chip in several directions, and lessening the nuclear threat overall in the Gulf remains a goal worth pursuing.
The outcome of any potential negotiations will depend on a number of factors, including Iran’s willingness to engage in constructive talks, the level of sanctions relief and other incentives the U.S. is willing to provide, and the international community’s support (particularly a reluctant Saudi Arabia and an even more reluctant Israel) for the negotiations.
The U.S. and Iran have had a complicated relationship and there have been significant obstacles to reaching a nuclear agreement in the past. However, Biden has expressed a willingness to re-engage with Iran and revive the 2015 nuclear deal. He has also indicated that his administration is open to diplomatic efforts to address concerns about Iran’s nuclear program and other issues a la carte. For a president looking to take big issue success into the next election, it just might be worth a chance.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Apocalypses Now, Afghan Redux Edition
It is altogether fitting and proper the final images for most Americans of their war in Afghanistan were chaotic airport scenes, all too familiar to many (Vietnam!) and all too alien to others (We lost? Nobody told me.) It is important two decades of smoldering ruin of American foreign policy — four presidents, six administrations, untold Afghan dead, 2,456 American dead, 20,752 American wounded, and some trillions of dollars spent, the money as uncountable as the Afghan dead and just as meaningless except as an aggregate. There will be deniers emerge in the decades to come, so a final set of pedestrian images of failure are necessary to rebuke them in advance. History has no intent on being being kind here, nor should it considering the scale and cope of the folly.
The final judgement on paper at least rests with the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the body set up by Congress to monitor the progress over twenty-some years of the national building project America set out to do in 2001. SIGAR just wrote a report entitled Why the Afghan Government Collapsed summing up its work. Here’s the bottom line up front, as the military likes to say: the SIGAR report mentioned Iraq, where a similar nation building effort failing for similar reasons, only three times in 60 pages, one a footnote. Nobody learned any lessons there and it is doubtful as the Blob salivates over rebuilding Ukraine even as this is written that any lessons will be carried forward from Afghanistan. Vietnam begat Iraq which begat Afghanistan which will all be forgotten for the next one. Vietnam was mentioned in the report once only, “U.S. efforts to build and sustain Afghanistan’s governing institutions were a total, epic, predestined failure on par with the same efforts and outcome in the Vietnam war, and for the same reasons.” You’d think a statement like that might be worth a bit of expansion.
SIGAR tells us the U.S. failed in Afghanistan in large part because “The Afghan government failed to recognize that the United States would actually leave.” There was thus never a push to solve problems or drive peace talks, simply a well-founded belief the American money which fueled abject corruption would continue indefinitely. Standing in the Tim Horton’s/Burger King at Bagram Air Base, thinking through lunch options before a trip to the air conditioned gym with its 75 treadmills in 2009, it all seemed a reasonable assumption. Left unspoken by SIGAR was that the Taliban saw just the opposite, that eventually, someday, maybe in a long time but not indefinitely, the Americans would have to leave. Same as the Alexander the Great, same as the British, same as the Soviets. That is one of the wonderful things about the SIGAR report, its historical portability. Change the dates and some adjacent facts and it reads well to describe the British ouster, or the Russian. The failure to win hearts and minds, the great costs to create the appearance of conquering great swathes of territory, the ability of the Afghan plains to absorb the blood of the conquerors, the endemic corruption of the puppet governments, it was all similar enough.
SIGAR ignores much of what was happening in the field to focus on intra-USG/Afghan government problems, as one might comment effusively on a particularly pretty hat and fail to notice the woman wearing it was naked. Before the collapse of the Afghan government in August 2021, the primary U.S. goal in Afghanistan we’re told was “to achieve a sustainable political settlement that would bring lasting peace and stability.” But the Taliban’s refusal to talk to the Afghan government without first negotiating with the United States was an obstacle to that goal. A similar occurrence happened in 2018, when the United States began direct talks with the Taliban. The U.S. direct negotiations with the Taliban excluded the Afghan government, weakening the negotiating position of the Ghani government and strengthening the Taliban. As Hugo Llorens, former U.S. special chargé d’affaires for Afghanistan, summarized, “Just talking to the Taliban alone and excluding our allies proved the Taliban’s point: The Afghan government were our puppets, you didn’t need to talk to them. You only need to talk to the Americans.”
SIGAR then notes with the obviousness of a car wreck “The U.S.-Taliban agreement appeared to have emboldened the Taliban. All the Taliban really did was agree not to attack U.S. forces on their way out.” As a result, the agreement likely led Taliban leaders to seek a resolution to its conflict with the Afghan government on the battlefield rather than through peace talks. If this wasn’t a family report, you’d expect a “no sh*t” to follow. All sides were befuddled. Former Ambassador Michael McKinley told SIGAR that the Afghan president consistently suggested development goals that were “completely off the charts,” and that his apparent “separation from Afghan reality” was concerning. He was “living in fantasyland.”
The key elements of the fantasy was the reconstruction effort, the idea that rebuilding Afghanistan via $141 billion in roads and schools and bridges and hardware stores would gut the Taliban’s own more brutal hearts and minds efforts. That was the same plan as in Iraq only minutes earlier, where between 2003 and 2014, more than $220 billion was spent on rebuilding the country (full disclosure: I was part of the Iraqi effort and wrote a book critical of the program, We Meant Well, for which was I was punished into involuntary retirement by the U.S. State Department.) Nonetheless, the Iraqi failure on full display, the United States believed that economic and social development programming would increase support for the Afghan government and reduce support for the Taliban insurgency (the log line for the war script.)
However, SIGAR writes, “the theory that economic and social development programing could produce such outcomes had weak empirical foundations.” Former Ambassador McKinley noted, “It wasn’t that everyone, including conservative rural populations, didn’t appreciate services… But that didn’t seem to change their views.” As the Army War College told us, “This idea that if you build a road or a hospital or a school, people will then come on board and support the government — there’s no evidence of that occurring anywhere since 1945, in any internal conflict. It doesn’t work.” As Scott Guggenheim, former senior advisor to President Ghani, told SIGAR, “Building latrines does not make you love Ashraf Ghani.” But that was indeed the plan and it failed spectacularly, slow over twenty years then all at once.
There is not justification to blame SIGAR for anything, though the temptation to mock their prose is great given the importance of the mess they sought to document. But no fair. The blame lies with six administrations’ worth of president’s and the men and women who created the Afghan policy. The great news is now, having laid this all out in black and white, we can set the SIGAR report on the shelf alongside a similar one for Iraq (where the watchdog was creatively called SIGIR, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction) knowing it will never, ever ever happen this way again, promise.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Brittney Griner Smokes Dope for Freedom
Was WNBA star Brittney Griner the subject of so much White House attention because she was an important showpiece demographic?
Nobody can claim they are unhappy Griner is home safely in the U.S., free again to use marijuana and remain seated during the national anthem ahead of her WNBA games. No one can sit here and say she should have better been left to suffer in Russia. But at the same time Griner through all fault of her own ended up in the middle of a foreign policy struggle. In the case of Russia, the U.S. specifically warns people like Griner “do not travel to Russia due to the unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine by Russian military forces, the potential for harassment against U.S. citizens by Russian government security officials, the singling out of U.S. citizens in Russia by Russian government security officials including for detention, the arbitrary enforcement of local law, limited flights into and out of Russia, and the Embassy’s limited ability to assist U.S. citizens in Russia.”
What did we learn from all this? It’s doubtful Griner herself learned much.
Firstly, Americans should not be as stupid as Griner and try to smuggle drugs into foreign countries with stricter laws than here at home, whether we’re at war or not. Griner’s action was a near-Hollywood trope, all the way back to Midnight Express, the “good” kid trapped in a horrible nightmare of foreign detention. Luckily we didn’t have to watch the, um, “romantic scene” pressed against the glass in Griner’s case the way it was highlighted in Express.
We also learned, in WNBA terms, the Biden administration has no game. They signaled their urgent desire to get Griner home so clearly the Russians knew the negotiations were going to be one-sided even before they started. If the Russians would have held out a little longer they might have gotten Alaska back in trade for Brittney. It was another reminder how bad Biden is at foreign affairs, and how transparent he is about domestic political gains however small.
The U.S. State Department estimates Griner was just one of more than 3,000 Americans imprisoned abroad, on grounds ranging from small amounts of dope up to murder. For all but a handful, the U.S. government explicitly states they cannot get them out of jail, tell a foreign court or government they are innocent, provide legal advice or represent them in court. The president certainly is not in the habit of making calls to say the Thai government telling them to please let your boyfriend Corn Pop go, honest, he didn’t mean to have that baggie of Ecstasy stuffed in his underwear at Customs.
Other than to be a “Brittney Griner” type, the key to getting the full force of the U.S. government on your side working for your release is to be “wrongfully detained,” a qualification which applies to fewer than 40 out of those 3,000 some Americans locked up.
There is a formal list of qualifications to turn an arrest into a wrongly detention, but the real answer is politics. Congress passed the “Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act,” named after the American missing in Iran for over 15 years. The 2020 law establishes 11 criteria for a wrongful detention designation, any one of which can be a sufficient basis to secure the detainee’s release, including “credible information indicating innocence of the detained individual,” “credible reports the detention is a pretext for an illegitimate purpose,” “the individual is being detained solely or substantially to influence United States Government policy or to secure economic or political concessions from the United States Government,” or a conclusion that U.S. “diplomatic engagement is likely necessary.” Secretary of State Blinken must personally approve such a designation, and upgrade the case from the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs (disclosure: where I worked for 22 years) to the Office of the Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs.
Take a look at two cases where the U.S. government did not step in to help Griner-style, to better illustrate the demographic politics involved.
Marc Fogel is “the other American” imprisoned in Russia on minor drug charges. He previously taught history at the international Anglo-American School in Moscow, and was well-known and well-thought-of by diplomats not only from the U.S. but also from Great Britain, Canada, and elsewhere (Fogel is a better comparator case to Griner than Paul Whelan, whose espionage case is complicated and shares few details with Griner’s and Fogel’s dope runs. Whelan was also passed over largely unnoticed by the media just this April in the exchange of Trevor Reed, another former Marine who had been held for more than two years over a bar fight, for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot serving a 20-year federal prison sentence for drug smuggling.)
For the past 11 months, Fogel has been held in Russian detention centers for trying to enter the country with about half an ounce of medical marijuana he’d been prescribed in the United States for chronic pain after numerous injuries. He is facing down a 14-year sentence. His trial included politicized accusations of close connections to the American embassy, was confused by a visa issue and his personal friendship with the ambassador, and false claims he aimed to sell marijuana to his students. All this led to a tougher than usual sentence. But the State Department has denied Fogel “wrongfully detained” status. Why not help Marc Fogel, President Biden?
Or consider the case in Japan of Navy lieutenant and former Mormon missionary Lieutenant Ridge Alkonis, currently locked up on a three-year sentence after two people were killed in a traffic accident doctors said may have been caused by a medical episode. Alkonis and his family hiked Mount Fuji when on the way home Alkonis blacked out at the wheel of his car and crashed, with his own family inside, in a restaurant parking lot, killing two Japanese citizens. Neurologists diagnosed Alkonis with Acute Mountain Sickness, which can cause sudden fainting up to 24 hours after rapid altitude change.
Alkonis’s family offered $1.65 million in compensation to the Japanese family for the loss of their relatives, along with an apology. The Japanese family, however, uncharacteristically refused the settlement and instead demanded jail time for Alkonis. Senator Mike Lee of Utah claims Alkonis is being targeted as a proxy for American forces stationed in Japan, who remain unpopular among many Japanese. On the face, the case certainly looks unfair and politicized in many ways. Why not help Lieutenant Alkonis, President Biden?
If neither of these cases catch your interest, as with Joe Biden, the State Department has thousands more to choose from. The point is not to have seen Brittney Griner suffer more; it’s to ask what makes her case special enough to warrant the designation “wrongfully detained” and the offer of a lopsided prison swap. If your answer is something other than her being a demographic showpiece, try again.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Much Ado About Nancy Pelosi and China
China policy seems to be made by, and written about by, adults who were often beaten up on the school playground. They retain the language of bullying, and weaknesses, and standing up, and the fantasy that something would sweep in and save them from losing another days’ lunch money (maybe an aircraft carrier group?) That these people are now in control of the media, if not the House, does nothing good for anyone, especially anyone located on either side of the Taiwan Strait. American seems dumb enough to play at this game; is Beijing also?
By now we all know Nancy Pelosi, likely with only a couple of months left as Speaker of the House, decided to spend her summer vacation stirring up the entire Pacific theater for what appears to be largely her own ego. Just days after RIMPAC 2022 concluded (China sure knew the U.S. just wrapped up the largest live fire exercise of the year in the Pacific, involved a dozen nations and hundreds of ships and planes all aimed at the “Blue” team defeating the “Red” team across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean. While the NYT editorial team was putting ice on their fat lips over in the Ron Burgundy Lounge, Beijing sure saw RIMPAC and Pelosi as part of the same) bully Pelosi shoved Joe Biden into a mud puddle and said she was going to Taipei. For those worried about “showing weakness,” mark this: Biden was too weak to tell a member of his own party to stay out of trouble when he was sick with Covid, sick with inflation, and digging an ever deeper hole in Ukraine, another war with no endgame but wait for the other side to win.
There was no great need for anyone to visit Taiwan this week. There was no crisis brewing, no event requiring anyone to stand with Taipei, support its democracy, or start wearing colored masks, not that the arrival of a lame duck Speaker would accomplish that or anything else in an quick show and tell. Nope, this mess was created by a Nancy Pelosi who wanted to show off, made worse by Joe Biden being too weak to stop her, and then exacerbated all to heck by China infusing much meaning into something that could have been shrugged off as having very little to say for itself.
Remember the advice your mom gave you on bullies? Ignore them and they’d go away? Imagine China listening to their mom on this one and announcing “We heard Nancy was going to Taipei. Neither Nancy nor Taipei are particularly important to the soon-to-be greatest economy in the world, so we’ll ignore them both.” If pressed for comment Beijing could add “But we hope Nancy chokes on her dinner” and leave it at that.
But while Nancy the Bully imagined she was standing up to Beijing the Bully, pretty soon everyone had to stand with, show up, not back down. So you have the New York Times, no stranger to losing its lunch money while being pantsed on the playground, saying “Bullies often seek tests of strengths to probe for signs of weakness. And they always read efforts at conciliation as evidence of capitulation.” The Times even quotes Sun Tzu (note to China watchers: if a pundit who does not read Chinese quotes Sun Tzu, duck, some b.s. is coming your way.) “If Beijing,” the Times continued, “had gotten its way over something as seemingly minor as Pelosi’s visit, it would not have been merely a symbolic victory in a diplomatic sideshow. It would have changed the rules of the game. Rather than avert a diplomatic crisis, it would have hastened a strategic disaster: the further isolation of a democratic U.S. ally and key economic partner as a prelude to surrender, war or both.”
So there you have it. We just barely avoided a strategic disaster, a game changer, a mere preclude to surrender or war… or both! Good golly, lucky for us Nancy landed the plane safely in Taipei.
It is time for some seriousness. China is not going to war with Taiwan. After all the smoke clears and overflights are tallied, China did only one substantive thing to punish Taiwan: China halted Taiwanese snack imports (including biscuits and pastries ahead of moon cake season) just before Pelosi’s arrival. That seems, Sun Tzu’s admonishment to try small steps before large ones aside, not something akin to war or surrender, and something unlikely to lead to violence. It actually really does not matter. Like Nancy.
Need we walk through the other 99 percent of what is going on between Taiwan and China? Between 1991 and March 2020 Taiwan’s investment in China totaled $188.5 billion, more than China’s investment in the United States. In 2019, the value of cross-strait trade was $149.2 billion. China applied in September to join the new Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. A week later, with no opposition voiced by Beijing, Taiwan applied to join as well. China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner. “One country, two systems” has not only kept the peace for decades, it has proven darn profitable for both sides. As Deng Xiao Ping said of this type of modus vivendi, “who cares what color a cat is as long as it catches mice.” China might one day seek to buy Taiwan, but until then what incentive would it have to drop bombs on one of its best customers? Heck, they even invited Taiwan to the Beijing Olympics Nancy Pelosi protested.
An attack on Taiwan would likely see a frightened Japan and South Korea step over the nuclear threshold and China would thus face more powerful enemies. In addition, a serious attack on Taiwan would severely damage the economy there Xi would no doubt see as part of the prize. Lastly, an attack on Taiwan would see Chinese killing Chinese, people who speak the same language and share several thousand years of culture. Pre-Covid, travelers from China made 2.68 million visits a year to Taiwan, many of which were to visit relatives. Student exchanges between Taiwan and China began in 2011, with some 25,000 Mainland kids studying on Taiwan pre-Covid. Even a “successful” attack would be near-political suicide for Xi. An invasion of Taiwan would leave the China politically isolated, economically damaged, and reputationally crippled. A failed attack could lead to a Taiwanese declaration of independence China would be incapable of stopping.
Caution is not appeasement. Every diplomatic move is not a full-spectrum weighing out of strength. Tiananmen was 33 years and a major change or two of governments ago (you still talking about that Kent State thing, bro?) Hong Kong was taken from China and colonized and exploited by the British before being returned to much the same status under Beijing. Same for Macao and the Portuguese. The U.S. fought China directly in Vietnam and Korea and that did not bleed over into Taiwan. China went nuclear and did not invade Taiwan.
Strength and weakness do not rest on a single visit by someone as close to the end of her tenure as Nancy Pelosi. Bullies are gonna bully but China and Taiwan are not in that sort of relationship; they exist in a complex diplomatic dance overshadowed by massive amounts of cross-straits commerce, investment, and travel. In every sphere outside the political and martial they grow closer together, not further apart, and much of the differences are promoted by the U.S. and an industry of “China experts” who thrive like dung beetles off the potential for conflict.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Is Stephanie Griner “Wrongfully Detained” in Russia?
The U.S. State Department estimates more than 3,000 Americans are imprisoned abroad, on grounds ranging from small amounts of marijuana up to murder. For all but a handful, the U.S. government explicitly states they cannot get you out of jail, tell a foreign court or government you are innocent, provide legal advice or represent you in court. The president certainly is not in the habit of making calls to the Thai government telling them to please let you go, you didn’t mean to have that baggie of Ecstasy in your underwear at Customs.
The key to getting the full force of the U.S. government on your side working for your release is to be “wrongfully detained,” a qualification which applies to fewer than 40 out of those 3,000 some Americans locked up. The U.S. recently declared Stephanie Griner wrongly detained. What does all that mean?
Near the start of the Ukraine war American WNBA star Stephanie Griner was arrested trying to enter Russia carrying vape oil which contained some sort of cannabis product illegal in Russia, entangling the U.S. citizen’s fate in the confrontation between Russia and the West. The Russian Federal Customs Service said its officials detained the player after finding vape cartridges in her luggage at Sheremetyevo airport near Moscow, and it released a video of a Griner going through airport security.
Normally Griner would be largely on her own. While the U.S. State Department visits Americans incarcerated abroad when that is possible (good luck to you if you’re popped in a country without U.S. diplomatic presence like Iran or North Korea, though the Swiss often will help out) to see to their welfare and try and maintain communications with home, the U.S. government will generally not get involved with your innocence or guilt, and will not make representations to the host government to free you. Most of us have seen Midnight Express and The Hangover. In the case of Russia, the U.S. specifically warns people like Stephanie Griner “do not travel to Russia due to the unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine by Russian military forces, the potential for harassment against U.S. citizens by Russian government security officials, the singling out of U.S. citizens in Russia by Russian government security officials including for detention, the arbitrary enforcement of local law, limited flights into and out of Russia, and the Embassy’s limited ability to assist U.S. citizens in Russia.”
Worse yet, it looks like Griner did really have that illegal substance in her possession. She just pleaded guilty in front of a Russian court. In almost every such instance she’d be on her own, but for one exception: the recent declaration by the United States that Griner is somehow “wrongly detained.”
The wrongfully detained category grew out of a realization that a small percentage of Americans arrested abroad were indeed political prisoners, arrested abroad under a country’s (unjust) laws, or were being held beyond the normal sentence or conditions for political reasons. In other words, hostages. If a person is declared “wrongfully detained” by the U.S., the rules do a 180 and the full powers of the U.S. government are used to free you.
Congress passed the “Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act,” named after the American missing in Iran for over 15 years. The 2020 law establishes 11 criteria for a wrongful detention designation, any one of which can be a sufficient basis to secure the detainee’s release, including “credible information indicating innocence of the detained individual,” “credible reports the detention is a pretext for an illegitimate purpose,” “the individual is being detained solely or substantially to influence United States Government policy or to secure economic or political concessions from the United States Government,” or a conclusion that U.S. “diplomatic engagement is likely necessary.” Secretary of State Blinken must personally approve such a designation, and transfer responsibility for the case from the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs (disclosure: where I worked for 22 years) to the Office of the Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs.
What is next for Griner now that she has been declared wrongfully detained? Depending on the political goals of the Russians, her guilty plea may suffice. A Russian court will impose a fine or jail sentence to be waived, and Griner can be on her way home. This is most common when the American has harmed a host country national and some public “justice” needs to be seen being done. A similar outcome often arises out of humanitarian needs, where Griner is declared in need of medical care not available in Russia and the country sends her home as an act of good will.
But given the politics of Griner’s arrest, a very likely outcome will be a prisoner exchange. The Russians are interested in the release of Viktor Bout, sentenced to 25 years in an American prison for trying to sell heavy weapons to Colombian terrorists. This would track with diplomacy just this April that lead to the exchange of Trevor Reed, a former Marine who had been held for more than two years over a bar fight, and Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot serving a 20-year federal prison sentence for drug smuggling. Reed’s health was cited as the motivator for the swap. One problem stands in the way of Griner’s release: it would be domestically politically difficult for the U.S. to again leave behind Paul Whelan, another former Marine, arrested in 2018 on espionage charges and sentenced to 16 years in prison, for Griner.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Diplomatic Diversity Fails (Again and Again) at State Department
America’s diplomat corps is the latest victim of diversity uber alles. Choosing diplomats for the 21st century is now about the same process as choosing which gummy bear to eat next. But fear not, because the State Department assures us America will have “an inclusive workforce that… represents America’s rich diversity.” At issue is the rigorous entrance exam, which once established a color-blind base line of knowledge among all applicants and was originally instituted to create a merit-based entrance system.
Until now, becoming an American diplomat started with passing a written test of geography, history, basic economics, and political science, the idea being it was probably good our diplomats knew something of all that. The problem was that racially things never quite added up; no matter what changes were made to the test or even if it was administered after an applicant had served two internships with State (below), blacks and other colors of persons could not pass in the right magic numbers. The answer? State has now simply done away with passing the test in favor of a “whole person” evaluation, similar to how many universities and the dead SAT gateway currently work.
The irony is the test was instituted to avoid backroom decisions on color (and religion, education, and peerage.) When America first found itself in need of a real diplomatic corps in the 19th century, there were three qualifications: male, pale, and Yale. The Rogers Act of 1924 was the first attempt to even out the playing field, instituting a difficult written examination everyone had to pass. The Rogers Act also created the Board of the Foreign Service and the Board of Examiners to choose candidates in lieu of smoky back room conferences.
But since the 1924 system never quite broke the hold of the Ivy League, a new law in 1946 Act closed down the Board of the Foreign Service Personnel and created the position of Director General to oversee a more fair system for recruitment and personnel. Yeah, you guessed it, that did not broaden diversity much either, so the present system of testing was rolled into place to fix everything via the Foreign Service Act of 1980. A tough written exam was to be followed by a tougher oral exam, all done blind — no one would know the background of the candidates or their race until the final steps. It did not work, at least in the sense people of color still seemed to lag statistically behind. So more interim steps were added, to include a series of personal essays (the “QEP”) to allow candidates to gain “life points” in addition to their performance on the tests. The written test was still retained as a threshold step. One had to pass it to move on to compete further for a coveted foreign service job.
More help was on the way. Study guides were created, and flash cards sold online. Test prep courses were started. Outside psychologists were brought in, and test administration was turned over to a private company, all in the name of eliminating biases. None of it worked. Blacks sued the State Department. Women sued the State Department. Hispanics argued they were not treated fairly. State created a Chief Diversity and Inclusion position. But still in 2013 the Senior Foreign Service, the top jobs at State, was 85 percent white. In 2021 it was 86 percent white. The broader diplomatic corps remained 80 percent white. State stayed stubbornly undiverse.
Where nothing else succeeded, State created two fellowships that have been used as vehicles to recruit people of “diverse backgrounds,” who worked out to be overwhelming black. In place are the Thomas Pickering Fellowship (run by HBCU Howard University) and the Charles B. Rangel Fellowship. Both claim entrants take the same entrance exams as anyone else, but omit that they do so after two summer internships with the State Department, plus assigned mentors. Fellows are also identified as such to those administering the oral exam required of all prospective diplomats. Having administered the oral exam myself, I knew I would have to justify to my boss’ boss any move to fail a Fellow before being overruled by her anyway. The programs increased the number of unwhite diplomats, as they were intended to do as a separate but equal pathway.
The problems came down the road, when black diplomats encountered the same promotion and evaluation system their white, green, and blue colleagues did. Diversity in the senior ranks of the State Department actually regressed over time. In 2008, black diplomats made up about 8.6 percent of the top ranks of the diplomatic corps. By 2020 only 2.8 percent of the same top ranks are black. The answer? It must be more racism (characterized diplomatically as “institutional barriers.”) Suggestions focused on offering blacks more fellowships to create a bigger pool, and creating special opportunities for blacks to snag better assignments (described as “promote diverse officers’ career development.”) That of course simply repeats the original sin of pushing less-prepared people upward to their point of failure. FYI: the State Department classifies most of its gender and race promotion results and does not generally release them to the public. However, data leaked to the NYT shows that only 80 black diplomats and specialists were promoted in the 2019 fiscal year, about one percent.
So under Joe Biden, the next step seemed obvious: do away with the threshold examination. Under new rules, everyone who takes the test goes on to the next stage, no matter if they do well, or poorly (formerly known as “failing.”) State has taken its hiring process full-circle, when again behind closed doors someone decides who moves forward based on race. State will thus absolutely ensure the right blend of flavors get through. So not the best of the best, but the best in each racial bucket, will pass. While a university has four years to try and educate or drop an unqualified candidate wrongly admitted, State will live with the mistakes these unqualified applicants make globally. As will America. Good luck everybody!
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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