Dear Colleague, You Are No Longer Required

I am sitting in the back of a coffee shop two blocks from the State Department on a Monday afternoon in May, watching the diplomatic corps of the United States of America walk past the window in clusters of two and three, carrying brown cardboard boxes and the faintly stunned expressions of people who have just been informed by email that twenty-eight years of their professional lives are now considered surplus inventory. They are the experts. They speak the languages. They know which colonel in which capital is sleeping with which ambassador's wife. They can read a Romanian wire and tell you in forty-five seconds whether the Kremlin paid for it. And now they are walking down 23rd Street with their personal effects in a box, because somebody back at the office sent them a form email beginning with the words Dear colleague.

I am told this is fine. I am told this is good, actually. I am told the Empire is being right-sized, optimized, restructured for a new era of American greatness. I am told this by people who have never been asked to negotiate with a Belarusian intelligence officer at three in the morning in a hotel bar in Minsk, and frankly I am beginning to suspect they could not find Belarus on a map if you spotted them four of the letters.

Kelly Adams-Smith was supposed to be the ambassador to Moldova. Twenty-eight years in the Foreign Service. She speaks Russian and Romanian and Czech and several other languages most members of the United States Senate cannot pronounce. She got the nomination from Biden and then waited and waited, the way you wait, while the Senate did its little theater of holds and silent objections, and then the election happened and somebody at the State Department sent her an email. The email said, and I quote:

Dear colleague, you are no longer considered to be a nominee.

That is the entire foreign policy of the United States, summarized in eleven words and a comma. Dear colleague. You are no longer considered. Find another position.

You know what would have been classier? Literally anything. A handwritten note. A phone call. A guy in a black suit showing up at her door with a velvet bag, bowing deeply, and explaining in Latin that the Republic no longer requires her services. Instead they sent the kind of email that a dental hygienist sends when she's confirming your next cleaning, except instead of a cleaning it's the end of your career and they have spelled your name wrong.

The numbers, for those of you keeping a Kalshi book on the structural integrity of the American empire. Historically, about 70% of U.S. ambassadors come from the career Foreign Service — people who have spent their lives learning what the difference is between a Sunni and a Shia, between a place where you can drink the water and a place where the water will kill you. Under the second Trump administration: more than 90% of ambassadors are political appointees. Which means donors. Which means the kind of person whose qualifications for representing the United States in a country with seven million inhabitants is that they once wrote a two-point-three million dollar check at a fundraiser in Palm Beach.

The Foreign Service has lost between 20 and 25 percent of its officers in the last 16 months, according to George Kent, the former ambassador to Estonia, who was also effectively fired on Day 1, which I believe is a phrase that used to be reserved for reality television contestants but is now apparently the standard Tuesday at Foggy Bottom. Kent estimates it will take a decade to recover. A decade, assuming we start trying to recover next Tuesday, which we will not.

And here is the part that haunts me, sitting in this coffee shop watching the corps file past with their Bankers Boxes. There are currently more than 80 American embassies without an ambassador. Eighty. Eight zero. Including, as it happens, Moldova — which, just to remind you, sits on the border of a country called Ukraine, which is, just to remind you again, currently being eaten alive by another country called Russia, which has, just to remind you a third time, made absolutely no secret of its intention to also eat Moldova at some point in the near-to-medium future. We have an empty chair at that embassy. We have an empty chair at eighty embassies. The Russians and Chinese, who are not stupid people, do not have empty chairs at their embassies. The Russians have a man at every desk in every capital, taking notes, and the man at the desk in Chișinău is right now writing a memo that begins with the words the Americans appear to have left.

We are, as Adams-Smith herself put it with the dry precision of a woman who has watched her life's work get hollowed out by a form letter:

We have more than 80 embassies without an ambassador right now. We are disarming. We're unilaterally disarming. Russia or China would never do that.

Iran, currently lobbing drones at U.S.-flagged tankers and watching the Navy sink its small boats in the Strait of Hormuz while gas prices climb thirty cents a gallon in a single week, would never do that either. Only the United States, in its current condition, looks at a building full of people who speak fourteen languages and can prevent wars by knowing what time the foreign minister of Kazakhstan eats breakfast, and decides what we really need is a guy from Palm Beach who once met the President at a cocktail party and now believes he is qualified to represent the world's oldest democracy in a country he has previously confused with a brand of vodka.

The diplomats walking past my window are not crying. They are too professional for that. They are walking with the calm and slightly haunted expression of people who can already see the next twenty years and know exactly how this ends. They will go to American University and teach. They will go to think tanks and write papers nobody reads. They will go to LinkedIn and update their profiles. Open to opportunities. Open to opportunities. Eighty embassies. Open to opportunities.

Daniel Rosenblum, who retired last year as the ambassador to Kazakhstan, said the thing that haunts him is how bad will the damage be, and how long will it take to recover. I will tell you, Daniel, since you asked. The damage will be very bad. The recovery will take longer than you think. And by the time anyone notices we have been disarmed, the men with the boxes will already be gone, teaching freshmen at American University about a country that used to take diplomacy seriously, before it sent everyone home with a Dear Colleague email and a fruit basket and a reminder that their parking pass expires on Friday.

The vibes, as they say, are immaculate. The vibes are also catastrophic.

Anyway. Gas is up another thirty cents.