Trump’s ad hoc diplomacy makes him look ‘extremely weak,’ says Amb McFaul

Michael McFaul: It’s not unusual, unfortunately. We have lots of political appointees who are ambassadors, and many of them got those positions by giving large financial contributions to presidential candidates and, in his case, to the inauguration party, where I understand he gave a million dollars.

Tragically and wrongly, in my view, Democrats and Republicans have been doing that for many decades. And I think the case of Ambassador Sondland kind of underscores why that’s not such a prudent policy, because you have people like him that don’t understand foreign policy, who are out of their depth of expertise. And in this case, you know, maybe involved in something that’s illegal.

Again, in my view, too many times. EU ambassador traditionally is a political appointee. The ambassador to the United Kingdom, Germany, France are all political appointees. And I want to stress there are some political appointees that have expertise. I, after all, was a political appointee, I want to state for the record. I only gave Barack Obama, I think, $250. So, I don’t think I was there because of my financial contributions.

But I had worked three years at the White House, the National Security Council. I’d worked most of my life on US-Russian relations, published lots. So there is a category like me who are experts, who are also political appointees. But the vast majority of political appointees are donors with almost no foreign policy experience. And I think that practice needs to stop.

Well, if it’s true, it’s it’s very significant and very wrong. And I appreciate that Ambassador Sondland is now telling the truth about it. But it’s also clear as day to me, given that the text of his conversations with other ambassadors from last week that were released after Ambassador [Kurt] Volker testified, that that he went along with this scheme. You know, Ambassador [Bill] Taylor, somebody who’s been a public career government official for three decades, very clearly said in those texts, I’m not going along with this scheme. And I think that shows the difference between career ambassadors — those who have worked in the State Department for decades and those that purchased their position, you know, during an inauguration party for President Trump.

Well, to the best of my knowledge, I don’t think there’s ever been a letter like that written by the president of the United States. You know, I worked at the White House for three years. I wrote some letters for President Obama to other leaders. Generally, that’s how it works, by the way. The national security staff does the first draft of those letters. It then gets “chopped,” is the verb — edited by senior people before it reaches the president.

And that language is shocking. Extraordinary. And, by the way, makes our president look extremely weak. I don’t understand what objective is being secured by that letter.

Moreover, Marco, I think it really underscores the breakdown of standard operating procedures when it comes to the making of American foreign policy and in its implementation. Both the Ukraine story and now this story, and this letter just underscores it’s broken. The interagency process is not working. The president is not sitting down there in the White House Situation Room with the secretary of defense, with the secretary of state deliberating on the policy, … they’re just implementing it in a rather ad hoc way. I’m being diplomatic there by using that adjective. And what suffers is American national interests. This improvisation, privatization, personalization of American foreign policy is not advancing our security interests.