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Diplomats Told to Take Loyalty Test or Resign [1]
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Date: 2025-01-29
Trump’s OPM (Office of Personnel Management) sent a loyalty demand to State Department diplomats, one of whom is a friend of mine, who then posted this on his FB board:
today I received an ignominious email from the
[email protected] inviting me to submit to a political loyalty test and new partisan rules of conduct OR reply simply before next Saturday with a one word response, “resign” to set the next stage of my own personal story in motion.
This person has served the United States for over 40 years as a soldier, including combat missions, and now as a diplomat whose actions have been commended by the Secretary of State. We joined the State Department at the same time and became friends during orientation. (I had to retire when I hit 65, so I only got to serve under Barack Obama.) We all took an oath to the Constitution, and in addition we agreed to publicly support and represent the policies of the current administration, whether Democratic or Republican. We could disagree — we were even invited to disagree — internally, but the face we show to the outside world must be unified. If we disagreed strongly enough, we could resign, and there is a history of high-level diplomats doing just that over our policies toward Vietnam, Israel, Russia, etc.
But that’s not enough for the Mangled Mussolini. He’s never had much use for diplomacy anyway; it’s too subtle for him, and success is often achieved by not advertising what we’re doing and especially not crowing about it afterwards. Diplomacy also requires taking into account multiple countries and non-state actors and their often conflicting goals and policies and somehow getting them all to reach a consensus that doesn’t involve war. That doesn’t set well with Trump; he thrives on chaos, he enjoys humiliating others, and his idea of nuance is to push his demands down others’ throats with a shovel instead of jamming them in with a pitchfork.
In my time, I understood the job of diplomats (not so much me personally, as I was too low-level) as seeing to it that the Defense Department would not have to be called on to do theirs. Trump is working hard (well, hard for him) to see it that war will become the first resort rather than the last. That is, if Hegseth can stay sober long enough.
But in the meantime, he’s seeing to it that the State Department becomes useless.
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