The State Department Reorganization Abroad Doesn’t Go Far Enough

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 the department’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, Scotland; Douala, Cameroon’ Medan, Indonesia; Durban, South Africa; and Busan, South Korea.

Plans are also to close the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center in Iraq, while downsizing in Baghdad and Erbil, Iraq. The memo also suggests consolidating consular functions in countries with multiple consulates—such as Japan and Canada—into a single location.

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 over-hyped 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 loath to volunteer for such tiny and often dangerous places. Many worked closely with the now-gone USAID anyway. If the concern is combating 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 probably be a short list, and the closure of the embassies will have little effect 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 from after the Second World War. 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 for 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 future 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 ha-ha 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; they stink 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-war 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 10). 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.