Diplomats in the United States engaged in the profane
The scandalous 'Fuck the EU' undersecretary of state Victoria Nuland as the quintessence of American foreign policy and an indicator of the competence of those who conduct it.
The contents of a telephone conversation between US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Ambassador to Ukraine Jeffrey Payet, in which the second person of the American diplomacy “sends” European partners, does not look anything out of the ordinary. Senior US officials and not such blurt out! Suffice it to recall the replica of the last US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, who was thrown into the camera of one of the local TV channels: “This is a wild country ...”. The head Chef McFaul, Secretary of State John Kerry, recently turned many into a stupor, stating that Washington will not Tehran is developing a peaceful atomic program. And this is literally the next day after, as a result of the difficult and lengthy negotiations in Geneva, the parties agreed to the opposite! And what about his last revelation that free choice "It does not necessarily lead to democracy".
Barack Obama, it would seem, God himself and the US Constitution are being asked to follow every word spoken publicly, but he also turned out to be far from the pattern of diplomacy. In April, 2011, during an official meeting with the Emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Tani, the American president praised the vis-à-vis "enormous contribution" to promoting democracy in the Middle East. However, two hours later, Obama remarked to his entourage, where journalists had accidentally fumbled that "in Qatar itself there is no noticeable movement in this direction." Half a year later, at the G20 summit, the US president was embarrassed when, along with his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, he began to wash the bones of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alongside his working microphone: “You’re sick and tired of it,”
Is it any wonder that, with such a president, the United States foreign policy machine moves with creak and more and more often flies into scandalous pits, giving many reasons for laughter. Another such excuse was the mandatory meeting of the members of the Senate Committee of Commerce with the newly appointed US ambassadors Obama. The four leaders of the US diplomatic missions in Argentina, Hungary, Iceland and Norway were not human resources workers and, as it turned out, had a very vague idea of their countries of destination. For example, for George Tsunis, it was a real revelation that the Norwegian Progress Party, which he called "anti-democratic", is in fact in the ruling coalition of the country. And Colin Bell, the ambassador to Hungary, is going overseas with a firm determination to condemn the Hungarian nationalists for oppressing the Jews. This is almost all that she managed to understand for herself about her future work.
History, pretty cheering senators and journalists, would have remained regular in a series of similar ones, but it coincided with the publication in the United States of two studies, which independently confirm that, first, the position of the US ambassador abroad has a very specific price. And, secondly, in order to become one, it is not at all necessary to have experience in diplomatic work.
Of course, Obama is not the first to award loyal supporters the status of ambassador in calm and pleasant countries. Under President Reagan, "thieves" among the ambassadors were almost 40%, under Clinton - 35%. However, by the second presidential term of Obama, nonprofessionals among the heads of US diplomatic missions became noticeably more than half. Under US law, it is the president who has exceptional authority in appointing ambassadors, and all diplomatic workers, as civil servants, must be selected on the basis of "equal opportunities". That is, among them must be representatives of all ethnic groups and social strata of the population. Personnel diplomat frankly does not like this order. “Why is our profession the only one where it is considered acceptable to appoint someone without experience?” Says Stephen Cackett, former vice president of the American Association of the Foreign Service, indignantly. “No one would ever think of putting a person without a medical experience at the head of the hospital!”
Denis Jett, a former colleague of Cashkett, who has served 28 for years at the State Department and has extensive experience as an ambassador, now works at the University of Pennsylvania. Here, together with Johannes Fedderke, he conducted a large-scale study and revealed such a pattern: the more funds in the election campaign of Barack Obama attracted a sponsor, the more chances he had to be an American ambassador to a rich and safe country (most often in Western Europe). The entrance ticket to the elite amateur club of amateurs, according to Jett and Fedderke, begins with 550 thousand dollars.
The findings of the University of Pennsylvania researchers were confirmed by experts of the US Center for Social Integration Michel Bekel and Chris Zubak, who compiled a special card and a list of 23 fundraisers (as fbii sponsors electoral presidential companies are called in the United States) by Barack Obama. In total, they attracted more than 16 million dollars to the election fund of the current head of the White House and, despite the lack of diplomatic experience, they found themselves in the cozy chairs of the ambassadors of the US-friendly Old World states. Is this not one of the reasons for the continued failure of the Barack Obama administration in the foreign policy arena and the steady growth of anti-American sentiment in the same Europe !? The authority of the White House in general, and the State Department in particular, does not increase the scandals, which are increasingly breaking out of the borders of the diplomatic corridors.
In the course of Obama’s first election campaign, the support of Kennedy’s influential clan in America helped him win the primaries first, and then the struggle for the White House. And although on the eve of his first presidency, Obama repeatedly spoke out against political appointments and promised to nominate only experienced personnel diplomats for serious positions in the State Department, he could not thank colleagues for his help. In the summer of 2013, Obama sent as the US ambassador to Japan the daughter of the murdered US President John F. Kennedy - Caroline, who had no diplomatic experience, eschewed publicity and was engaged in paper work in her late Father’s Presidential Library. Needless to say that the newly-diplomat did not know Asia and Japanese at all.
Louis Sasmen, unlike Caroline Kennedy, speaks the language of the host country perfectly well. This is not surprising, since the former lawyer and banker has been the head of the US embassy in the UK for more than four years. He has no diplomatic experience and merit, but he gathered 2,3 million dollars into the Obama election fund. Interestingly, a warm place in London Sasmen stood up in a confrontation with another major sponsor of the current president - the chief editor of Vogue magazine Anna Wintour. Rumors about her appointment to the United Kingdom at the end of 2012 caused such a negative reaction in the British press that the White House had to play back.
The fact that such appointments of ambassadors can lead to is vividly illustrated by the resignation of Cynthia Stroum, who led the US diplomatic representation in Luxembourg for eleven months. The former investor in start-up companies was so self-indulgent, aggressive and rudeness that most of the embassy staff hurried to quit, and some even chose to transfer to troubled Kabul and Baghdad. By the way, the American embassy in Iraq also did not avoid a scandal, when it turned out that among the two thousand mission personnel, very few people speak Arabic ...
Writer Nicholas Kralev, working on the book "The Second Army of America," talked with hundreds of American diplomats and came to the unequivocal conclusion: most Obama appointees have no idea how to manage embassies and conduct diplomacy in the 21st century. The situation is not so ridiculous as it is dangerous - the total profane are in charge of the foreign policy of a nuclear power. It is unlikely that such a strategy will lead to something good.
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