US President Joe Biden is to hold a high-stakes virtual summit with Chinese Prsident Xi Jinping (習近平) today, his latest initiative to restore US authority on the world stage.
However, the US president’s efforts are hampered by a logjam in Washington that threatens to cripple US diplomacy.
As of Nov. 5, Biden had made 78 ambassadorial nominations, but just seven of them — or 9 percent — had been confirmed by the US Senate, the White House said.
Photo: Reuters
Former US presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump had 77 percent and 70 percent of their ambassadorial nominees confirmed respectively at this stage.
The inertia has left posts in vital world capitals unfilled — Biden is yet to even nominate an ambassador to the UK — and the US confronting foreign policy crises with one arm tied behind its back.
“We’re 10 months into the Biden administration and only a fraction of its diplomatic players are in place to engage the world,” former US assistant secretary of state for public affairs Philip Crowley said.
“The president has said repeatedly that ‘America is back,’” Crowley said. “The lack of ambassadors in scores of countries undercuts that message. Sure, the top priorities essentially are still being addressed, but lots of valuable initiatives get placed on the back burner waiting for ambassadors to arrive. Country by country, it is just hard to build a lot of momentum in the relationship with the country team operating at less than full capacity.”
The problem was starkly illustrated during a row over France’s loss of a submarine contract with Australia, which instead opted for nuclear-powered submarines to be developed with the US and UK.
There was no US ambassador in Paris for French President Emmanuel Macron to deal with, and like many world leaders, he does not engage with the charge d’affaires or other substitutes.
The depleted diplomatic corps is a symptom of Washington’s polarized politics and evenly divided Senate.
Two right-wing Republicans, US senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, have been slowing down the process by objecting to the Senate moving forward via unanimous consent.
Cruz is taking a stand because he objects to a pipeline that would carry gas from Russia to Germany and wants the Biden administration to impose sanctions to stop it.
His office told The Associated Press that he was committed to using whatever leverage he has to force “mandatory sanctions.”
Hawley has demanded that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin resign because of the US’ “botched Afghanistan withdrawal.”
“Until there is accountability, the least we can do is actually vote for nominees to leadership positions at the state department and department of defense,” Hawley said.
Without these holdouts, the nominees could be confirmed through a voice vote, a process taking only minutes that can be used so long as no senators object. This is how more than 90 percent of nominees of Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, were confirmed at similar stages of their respective presidencies.
However, Cruz and Hawley are insisting on a more time-consuming process in a Senate that already has an overwhelming to-do list.
Democrats regard the tactics as playing politics with national interest.
“It’s a terrible impediment to our resuming democratic partnership and leadership in the world,” US Representative Jamie Raskin said. “The right-wing plan has been to dismantle and disable democratic governance and leadership. They want to make the government dysfunctional so they can take it over and use it for their own purposes. We’re just trying to defend the idea of the reality of democracy.”
However, there was some progress last month, when the Senate confirmed, via voice vote, former US senator Jeff Flake as ambassador to Turkey; Cindy McCain, widow of US senator John McCain, as ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture; former US senator Tom Udall as ambassador to New Zealand; and Victoria Reggie Kennedy, widow of former US senator Ted Kennedy, as ambassador to Austria.
Notably all four had links to the Senate.
The snail’s pace of confirmations has caused alarm at the American Foreign Service Association, which is the union and professional association of the US foreign service, with 17,000 members in six agencies and departments.
“No other country doesn’t send ambassadors on a regular, timely basis, and no other country in history, including ours, has ever had this many vacant jobs for this long,” association president Eric Rubin said. “The world is changing. It is by no means in a stable state, and we have to work out and defend our role in this new world. The time has passed when the world is just going to tolerate our peculiarities. ‘The US doesn’t fill half its ambassadorships for a year? Oh, well, that’s the US.’”
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