Opinion: Diplomats are having an impeachment moment in the sun. It won’t last

In embassies in remote corners of the world, American diplomats have been thrilled in recent days to see State Department employees, including former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, testifying in the Ukraine scandal and coming off as patriots and heroes.

The new system improved the quality of American statecraft. But the foreign service had image problems from the start. They mostly stemmed from its design as a small, pointy-headed group of specialists with their own perspective on world affairs. The public never understood these pinstriped experts in strange foreign societies, and presidents often considered their independent advice an obstacle to their ambitious plans to win glory on the world stage.

Democratic presidents including Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were also suspicious of the diplomatic bureaucracy and tried to keep key foreign initiatives away from them. In 1962, Kennedy picked a young lawyer with no relevant background rather than a foreign service officer to be his advisor on an area of growing importance — Indochina. When the candidate, Michael V.

When Donald Trump became president, the career diplomats braced themselves. In his inaugural address, Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington. The foreign service hands knew his target wasn’t lobbyists or businesspeople seeking to unfairly profit from government spending, but career government workers. And their anxieties were justified. The new administration shrank the State Department and reduced the career diplomats’ role.

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