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Sunday, November 26th, 2017

Diplomats Sound the Alarm as They Are Pushed Out in Droves

Author:     GARDINER HARRIS
Source:     The New York Times
Publication Date:     NOV. 24, 2017
 Link: Diplomats Sound the Alarm as They Are Pushed Out in Droves
Stephan:   As the world becomes ever more complex, the Trump administration is becoming increasingly simplistic, decision making concentrating in fewer and fewer individuals, and they with little or no experience or knowledge of world diplomacy. Learning to be an expert in another culture takes years; it is a hardwon skill set. What is happening to the U.S. State Department, in my view, is a catastrophe in the making. Here's the story.

Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson at the White House on Monday. Mr. Tillerson has made no secret of his belief that the State Department is a bloated bureaucracy.
Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Of all the State Department employees who might have been vulnerable in the staff reductions that Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson has initiated as he reshapes the department, the one person who seemed least likely to be a target was the chief of security, Bill A. Miller.

Republicans pilloried Hillary Clinton for what they claimed was her inadequate attention to security as secretary of state in the months before the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Congress even passed legislation mandating that the department’s top security official have unrestricted access to the secretary of state.

But in his first nine months in office, Mr. Tillerson turned down repeated and sometimes urgent requests from the department’s security staff to brief him, according to several former top […]

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1 Comment

  1. Mark R on Monday, November 27, 2017 at 12:43 am

    Hard to say if this is positive or negative. Given the number of wars our corporate owned government is involved in..overt and covert..around the world, I’d say diplomats are not effective in their mission to seek peace. Perhaps because they are overwhelmed and overshadowed by the military industrial complex and hegemonic puppet masters..