Donald J. Trump’s unconventional approach to virtually everything presidential has taken yet another bizarre turn.
The president-elect has issued an order for all U.S. diplomats — ambassadors, if you will — turn in their letters of resignation and vacate their posts on Inauguration Day.
All of ’em, I tell ya. They will have to leave diplomacy to the pros on their staffs; all political appointees have to go. Pronto! Immediately!
It’s way too early to tell what this means, other than the obvious, which is that Trump is breaking with decades of diplomatic tradition.
But, hey — tradition, shmadition. Who needs it when you’ve got such a successful businessman and dealmaker at the helm?
My concern is this: We’d better not have a diplomatic crisis develop in, say, one of the nuclear-power nations where we now have embassies in the days immediately after Trump takes office as president.
Think it can’t happen? It surely can.
What’s more, the directive has put many of our senior diplomats in a world of major inconvenience. As the New York Times reports: “In Costa Rica, Ambassador Stafford Fitzgerald Haney is hunting for a house or an apartment as his family — which includes four school-age children and his wife, who has been battling breast cancer — struggles to figure out how to avoid a move back to the United States with five months left in the school year, according to the diplomats.”
I know that’s of little direct concern to most Americans. My bigger worry is that in countries on the front lines of, say, open warfare — places such as Jordan, Israel, Turkey — there well could be a crisis explode while we have no one at his or her post standing ready to speak for the United States of America.
Do our allies around the world have reason to be a bit jittery at this news? I believe they do.