As he prepared for a July trip to Malaysia to attend a regional meeting of ministers – his first visit to Asia as secretary of state – Marco Rubio turned to the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs’ multilateral affairs office.
The experts’ task: to bring Mr. Rubio up to speed on the complexities of U.S. interests in the vast Indo-Pacific – a region the Trump administration has declared to be its top priority in an era of intensifying big-power competition.
Before Mr. Rubio had even returned home from the meeting, however, the State Department announced that the East Asian multilateral affairs office was being shuttered, and its experts shown the door.
Why We Wrote This
The Trump administration says it is downsizing the State Department to make it more nimble. Critics say the staff cuts will hobble the agency.
That was just one small piece of a larger downsizing and streamlining of State Department operations. More than 1,350 officers and diplomats – many of them with extensive experience in critical areas of the world – were fired. Entire offices, such as the one for East Asian multilateral affairs, were dismantled.
Mr. Rubio describes the reforms as a drive to create a more nimble and efficient State Department for the 21st century. Supporters of President Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, in Congress and elsewhere, say the department had strayed from serving U.S. national interests. Instead, they see it promoting what Mr. Rubio calls a “radical ideology” and a “woke” agenda, putting issues such as women’s rights, climate change mitigation, and democratization above the interests of the American people.
Many foreign policy experts and experienced diplomats, though, warn that the loss of expertise in so many critical areas of foreign policy dangerously weakens the depth and breadth of U.S. diplomatic capabilities.
“The world is complex and only getting more complex, but when I look at the reform, I see that the understanding of that complexity has been squashed out,” says Piper Campbell, a retired U.S. diplomat who specialized in Asia and now chairs the Department of Foreign Policy and Global Security at American University in Washington.
The downsizing, she adds, means “we lose perspective, and we lose expertise, at a time when they are more needed than ever.”
“What the world sees from all this turmoil … is retreat, U.S. callousness, U.S. transactionalism, and unreliability,” says Gregory Poling, an Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington.
“None of these are things you want to be showcasing,” he says, “especially in a region where you are competing with the power you maintain is your biggest rival,” which is China.
U.S. foreign policy streamlined, or shrunk?
The elimination of the East Asia bureau’s multilateral affairs office will weaken Washington’s influence and image in the critical South China Sea region, Mr. Poling says, and leave U.S. strategy at the mercy of a “less coordinated, more unpredictable, and more politically driven foreign-policy planning process.”
State Department officials say the reforms will instead streamline the foreign policy process and eliminate costly duplication of functions.
In remarks before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in July, Michael Rigas, the deputy secretary of state for management and resources, said the downsizing is aimed at building a more efficient foreign policy apparatus focused on U.S. national interests.
“For too long, single-issue offices have mushroomed in number and influence,” he said, “often distorting our foreign policy objectives to serve their specific interests, slowing down the department’s ability to function.”
For Mr. Poling, the reduction in the number of experts and the range of their expertise risks being “disastrous” for U.S. global relations, not least in Asia.
He points to India’s recent drift – away from its role as a key U.S. partner in countering China’s regional rise and toward closer relations with both Beijing and Moscow – as a prime example of how a weakened foreign-policy process is affecting big-power relations.
“The India relationship is in real crisis, and much of the blame for that is structural,” he says. “A depleted State Department is left to react to decisions coming from a president who has made clear he doesn’t want advisers who will steer him away from what he wants to do.”
Reform long overdue?
Proponents of Secretary Rubio’s overhaul say it is long overdue, and necessary to recenter U.S. foreign policy on core national interests.
In a recent article in Foreign Policy magazine, A. Wess Mitchell, a former assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, argues that the post-Cold War era of unchallenged U.S. supremacy allowed the nation’s diplomacy to go soft, preoccupied by “fix the world” social and environmental issues.
That means the State Department no longer serves the interests of all Americans and is ill-equipped to take on the challenges of a world dominated by big-power rivalries, argues Dr. Mitchell, now a principal at the Marathon Initiative in Washington.
“The progressive causes that the department has embraced in recent years may be popular in California or Sweden,” he writes, “but they are often irrelevant or even antagonistic to the world’s developing countries and traditional societies, many of which are located in the very parts of Asia and Africa that are at the forefront of great-power competition.”
Advocates of the “soft power” approach do not agree.
“America’s strength has always come from integrating our foreign policy with our values,” says Uzra Zeya, who served as undersecretary for civilian security, democracy, and human rights during the Biden administration.
Those values include “support for universal freedoms, free and fair elections, women’s and LGBTQ rights,” says Ms. Zeya, who now heads Human Rights First, a New York based advocacy group. And those principles also sit comfortably with big-power competition, she says. “It is not an either/or.”
U.S. national security and prosperity – and thus the interests of the American people – will be best served by pursuing both, she says, offering an example. “We know from experience that peace agreements that involve women … last longer. That is a positive for the women who are empowered,” she adds, “but it also enhances international security and ends up serving all of us.”
Ms. Campbell, of American University, says she has noticed recently a rising confidence among Chinese scholars that a U.S. retreat from soft-power initiatives and alliance-building is enabling China’s global rise.
“Diplomacy is about influencing others to want to work in the same direction that we do,” she says. “That is not ‘soft’ or ‘woke,’ it’s smart and strategic.”
