 |
| Remember who you work for. |
According to a Friday night report in the The New York Times, Tillerson has not only frozen hiring and failed to nominate people to the majority of the department’s politically-appointed positions — he’s also engaged in what appears to be an intentional campaign to push out as many career diplomats as possible.
“[Tillerson’s] small cadre of aides have fired some diplomats and gotten others to resign by refusing them the assignments they wanted or taking away their duties altogether,” the Times report states. “Among those fired or sidelined were most of the top African-American and Latino diplomats, as well as many women, difficult losses in a department that has long struggled with diversity.”
Among the methods used to push out senior diplomats is by forcing them to undertake menial tasks under Tillerson’s presidentially-directed order to accelerate Freedom of Information Act requests (which are currently backlogged). The task has required every department in the bureau to contribute. As a result, “midlevel employees and diplomats — including some just returning from high-level or difficult overseas assignments — to spend months performing mind-numbing clerical functions beside unpaid interns.”
“The United States is at the center of every crisis around the world, and you simply cannot be effective if you don’t have assistant secretaries and ambassadors in place,” R. Nicholas Burns, a retired career diplomat who served as under secretary of state during George W. Bush’s adminsitration, told the Times. “It shows a disdain for diplomacy.”
The report notes that Tillerson still has not nominated an assistant secretary for East Asia or an amabssador to South Korea — two positions that are integral to finding a diplomatic solution to President Donald Trump’s continually escalating feud with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
One former ambassador said that either the Trump Administration does not believe that America should continue to be a world leader or else they are simply incompetent.
Or else they could simply be doing exactly what their Russian puppet masters have directed them to do.
Source http://ift.tt/2jn4xfy
