The State Department Between Rubio's Cuts and Structural Limitations

The issue is not just funding and staff, it's domestic politics and problematic alliances.

Two pieces caught my attention in recent days, each about a key U.S. foreign policy institution. At The Hill, Filip Timotija reports on the dismissal of well over 1,000 employees at the State Department; at Politico, Nahal Toosi covers what she calls, in the title, “the Dysfunction at Rubio’s Shrunken National Security Council.”

As with USAID, the conversations around these institutions bother me on two levels - I’m alarmed by the hollowing out of State, but I’m also disappointed that State’s mainstream defenders only seem to be able to speak in the language of NATSEC. The United States desperately needs a foreign policy that is neither this lurching, post-neocon mess under Trump, nor the staid-sounding but ultimately very dangerous liberal imperialism that proceeded under Joe Biden.

Here is an excerpt from Timotija’s piece:

“There are active conflicts and humanitarian crises in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, Haiti and Myanmar—to name a few. Now is the time to strengthen our diplomatic hand, not weaken it,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a statement backed by all Democrats on the committee.

“From pursuing peaceful resolutions to out-competing China diplomatically and economically, we can’t afford to not have experienced diplomats at the table,” she added.

These arguments - the U.S. needs a robust State Department in order to solve crises and compete with China - land poorly for me. For one thing, the U.S. has been criticized across the board for its approach to these specific conflicts even at times when the State Department was better staffed. The Biden administration specifically failed on all five of those conflicts, and failed for a combination of structural, procedural, and political reasons.

Let’s leave aside the hot-button topics of Ukraine and Gaza and instead pick Sudan as our quick case study. Many commentators (for example Cameron Hudson, here) have pointed to two key factors that doomed Sudan policy under Biden: neglect, and an unwillingness to challenge the United Arab Emirates, widely alleged to be a key supplier of weapons and other backing to the Rapid Support Forces, one of the two main actors in Sudan’s civil war. The neglect (in Sudan’s case, failing to swiftly name a special envoy, not mentioning or engaging the crisis frequently, etc.) could be a product of limited bandwidth. But so often, such neglect comes out of political considerations - we can go all the way back to Susan Rice’s infamous remark inside Bill Clinton’s White House, a remark quoted in Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell and elsewhere, about Rwanda in 1994: “If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November election?” It’s not always that stark, but the idea of State as a crisis-preventing, crisis-solving shop is hard to take at face value.

The United States could, I think, be a peacemaker in the world. But in order to do that, Washington would need not simply a deep bench of diplomats but also (1) a fundamentally different set of relationships with other major powers, (2) an acknowledgment of the U.S. role in causing some conflicts and allowing many others to fester, and (3) a different kind of calculus emanating from the White House about the relationship between foreign conflicts and U.S. domestic politics.

The point about countering China is so transparently silly that it’s almost not worth addressing, but to cover it briefly, there is simply no way that a fickle, declining superpower that mostly offers lectures and stop-start initiatives can “compete” with a country that can think and execute over long time horizons while giving its partners tangible benefits. More or fewer diplomats, sitting in fortress embassies and deeply disconnected from the countries where they’re posted, will not affect those basic facts. More diplomats is better! But it’s not a personnel issue.

Let’s turn to the National Security Council. Here I will not lament its evisceration as much as with State, because the NSC strikes me as (1) a mostly regrettable product of the supercharging of the American national security state in the post-World War II context and then another round of supercharging in the aftermath of 9/11, and (2) a fundamentally political body designed more as a vehicle for the president’s inner circle to try to align foreign policy with the president’s political calculations, rather than as a some technocratic body playing a coordinating role to ensure that the best ideas emerge through “interagency process.”

Here’s a quote from Toosi:

Since Rubio took over the NSC, he has shrunk its staff by more than half. It now has fewer than 100 people, according to a person familiar with the NSC process. Arguably more importantly, Rubio has imposed changes to what’s called “the interagency process” — a key function of the NSC that involves coordinating policy and messaging across government agencies and departments.

That process, two people told me, is now one in which important meetings aren’t held, career staffers are often in the dark about what’s expected of them and some people or their institutions try to take advantage of power vacuums. I granted many of those I spoke to anonymity to discuss internal administration dynamics.

Some U.S. diplomats and other national security professionals are worried that the current structure means small crises will explode into big ones because they don’t get early attention, and that key officials who deal with priority issues, such as Ukraine, are being iced out of important conversations.

I certainly think has to be some process and coordination (although there are also too many agencies to coordinate between). But I also think that decisions ultimately flow from whims at the top - perhaps more so with Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth in power, but also just as a basic function of how things work in Washington. My own time in government (2013-2014) was arguably at the height of technocratic liberal control over these institutions, and power ultimately resided mostly with the “principals” (mostly political appointees and/or top career bureaucrats who had good relationships with the White House) and their proxies.

I’m also skeptical of the idea that a smoothly functioning NSC can make sure “small crises [don’t] explode into big ones.” Is there a verifiable record of success here? Government and ex-government officials have often made a plausible case to me, in conversation, that X or Y situation was defused through the timely intervention of American diplomats - such-and-such African president was persuaded not to run for a third term, such-and-such parties agreed not to boycott an election, etc. But those stories and arguments are impossible for someone out of government to prove or disprove, and so we end up with a counterfactual (“sure the world looks bad but it would look worse without us”). I also think there’s a penchant among U.S. officials for taking credit when things go well overseas but disavowing responsibility (and even the ability to have made a difference) when things go poorly. Meanwhile there are so many cases of “small crises exploding into big ones” that the idea of U.S. leadership or involvement keeping a lid on things begins to seem far-fetched. We are back to the factors I mentioned above, namely U.S. domestic politics and geopolitics, factors that impinge again and again on both early action and creative, decisive diplomacy.

The idea of the U.S. as this manager of the world’s crises also strikes me as at least latently imperialist. Put differently, the image of a behemoth national security bureaucracy surveilling the world in order to anticipate and intervene in “crises” - and who gets to define what is a crisis? - could actually be a very uncomfortable thought for people involved in those situations.

What Trump and Rubio (and Hegseth) are doing, then, strikes me as the amateur-ization of a very problematic machine. If there is a dangerous machine, you want it to be operated by someone who knows what they are doing. Yet if even the professional operators constantly use this dangerous machine in ways that cause harm, and fail to use it to prevent harm, it makes sense to want a different machine.

If there is a silver lining here I suppose it’s that the next president and particularly the next Democratic president will have an opportunity not just to rebuild State, but to reimagine it. A more empowered State Department could indeed by a vehicle for peacemaking if the next White House was willing to take political risks and challenge allies. I’m pessimistic that most Democrats would take that opportunity, though.