JOEL ROSE, HOST:
The American ambassador to Greece resigned under pressure this week. Kimberly Guilfoyle, the ex-fiancee of President Trump's son, served in her role for about a year until a story by the Wall Street Journal reported that she'd asked a Trump donor to pay her credit card bill before she was appointed. This scandal is yet another blow for America's diplomatic corps, already understaffed during President Trump's second term.
So what is the state of the U.S. State Department? We have called up James Story, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela and a state department veteran to answer that question. Ambassador, welcome to the program.
JAMES STORY: Thank you all so much for having me today. Appreciate it.
ROSE: I want to say first, NPR has not confirmed the reporting by the Wall Street Journal, but I wonder what your reaction was to Miss Guilfoyle's resignation.
STORY: I was simply astonished. As a diplomat, anybody in the foreign service - and certainly as an ambassador - we're under extraordinary scrutiny on gifts you can accept. Anyone looking to do work with the U.S. government, you're prohibited from receiving gifts from them. So the fact that allegedly someone spent 100,000 - or there was a request for $100,000 to pay off a credit card bill - was really astonishing to me.
ROSE: You were a career diplomat under administrations of both parties and retired this May. How do you assess the State Department as you have known it versus how it exists today?
STORY: So I think the state of the State Department right now is in flux. We certainly lost a lot of really talented folks. The fact that we're out recruiting for new people right now is indicative of the fact that we don't have enough people doing America's diplomacy abroad. I mean, we are the first line of defense for the American people. And I think we need to be well-funded. The State Department needs to be well-funded. But again, certainly, you can always improve an organization. You can always do better as an organization. But I think some of the changes that transpired were ultimately very harmful to the State Department.
ROSE: There are some very big events happening around the world at a time when the top job in some U.S. embassies around the world is vacant. And I'm thinking of Russia, of Ukraine, of Germany, and I could name many others. What's the impact on American foreign policy when so many of these positions are not staffed?
STORY: Well, I can tell you, you know, the host government, first of all, views the lead diplomat from the United States differently if she or he is an ambassador, meaning the president's personal representative, or a charge d'affaires. The Saudi family, the kingdom, do not want to deal with a charge d'affaires. They want to have an ambassador, a seated ambassador. So you have a little more power when it comes to organizing the interagency. Your engagement directly with the government, I think, all comes down to having gone through that Senate confirmation process and being chosen, then going through all the scrutiny, financial and otherwise, that allows you to be abroad as an ambassador representing the United States. And when you don't have that, you're indicating at times to that country that, well, we're not prioritizing you.
ROSE: What about not having ambassadors in many countries in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf? What is the concrete impact, would you say, of that?
STORY: The first impact is that you're losing out on tremendous experience. When you don't have that person, especially right now in the Middle East, I think it puts us fundamentally in a bad position. You have this war in Iran that is expanding. It affects all of the different countries in the region. It's definitely a regional conflict now. Who is the person that goes in, that gives the message - in Qatar or in Kuwait or Iraq or what have you - to that host country? And does that message have the same resonance that it would have if that person had been the ambassador? And I would say that it does not.
ROSE: Just under 50% of U.S. ambassadorships are vacant. Is it unusual for a number to be that large so far into a president's term?
STORY: It's certainly unusual. And unfortunately, this has become a bipartisan problem of Senate nominations for judges and ambassadors and others to be held up based on other things. And it used to be kind of a regular process where people would go up, and you'd get red-lined out. In other words, basically, by unanimous consent, ambassadors were approved. Unless there were some big problems, it's pretty extreme right now to have so many ambassadorships empty.
But it's even more extreme to have so many ambassadorships headed over to political appointees rather than people who have spent decades working in the foreign service, learning the language, learning the history, understanding the bilateral relationships, understanding how Washington works. And when you put amateurs - and some political appointees are good, let me be very clear. But when you put amateurs in charge, sometimes you'll get an amateur outcome.
And I think in the case of Ambassador Guilfoyle in Greece, we had a very amateur outcome that was foretold based on all of the problems that should have come out in her vetting before being identified. What particular skills she brought to bear for Greece - other than proximity, perhaps - remained a question mark for us. But for me, it's the 80% of ambassadors that have actually been put in the field are political appointees - that's the most shocking statistic.
ROSE: Yeah, help me understand what's going on there because other administrations have political appointees in important ambassadorships, right? What's been different about how this administration is doing it?
STORY: Well, now it's not just for certain bilateral missions where the expectations of the host country is that it's going to be somebody close to the president, right? The Court of St. James, for instance, for Great Britain - that always goes to a political appointee, somebody who can pick up the phone and get the president on the line.
And anywhere you have a bilateral relationship that's stable, then you have a few countries that sometimes are political appointees and sometimes are career people. Brazil is an example. Most of the time, it goes to a career person, not a political. What we're seeing now is that countries that have traditionally had hairier relationships, let's say, have gone political rather than to the traditional route. At some point, that inexperience may be seen.
ROSE: The US Agency for International Development, generally known as USAID, ceased functioning as an independent entity in July, and the State Department took over some foreign assistance programs. How is that working, in your view?
STORY: Well, it's like asking somebody that shops at the grocery store for vegetables to become a farmer, to be honest with you. We had a competitive advantage against every other country in the world for how we did development. You know, we saved millions of lives through PEPFAR, a George Bush program - this was the President's Emergency Program For AIDS Relief - millions of lives saved in Africa providing HIV medications.
So you had people who spent 20 or 30 years who really understood how to do these programs, and now we're supposed to replicate that with people who have good intentions but don't have the experience. I think this is going to go down as one of the biggest own-goals we've ever had.
I think that USAID needed some reform. I don't disagree that it should have been housed within the State Department, for instance. I think, you know, sometimes we needed to have more policy control over some of the development programs we were doing. But to wholesale destroy an organization that had done so much goodwill and built up so much soft power for the United States, it really is something that - for me, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
ROSE: I've been speaking to former U.S. ambassador James Story. Thank you very much for your time.
STORY: Thank you so much for having me today. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
