Yovanovitch testimony shows US foreign policy is ‘in shambles,’ former diplomat says

Molly Montgomery: Absolutely. Well, first off, let me just say that Ambassador Yovanovitch is a profile in courage, as are George Kent and Bill Taylor, who testified yesterday. And I think what comes across so clearly in her testimony today is just what the United States is missing out on by sidelining its career officials. 

Well, it certainly has made clear to the American people and to the world that our foreign policy and the State Department are in shambles. And I don’t think you have to look any further than the way she has been treated and others in the State Department have been treated to understand why. I fully agree with her characterization that the department has been hollowed out. And unfortunately, diplomacy is a craft that takes years, if not decades, to learn. And so that expertise will not be able to be replaced quickly or easily. It’s a real loss to us. 

There are a lot of us who have served the country in various capacities, who I think were very emotional in hearing her speak about how it has felt to undergo the traumatic experience of being targeted by her own president and pulled from an assignment in which, by all accounts, she was succeeding. And so it is very troubling, particularly having seen the president’s tweet while her testimony was ongoing, to see, from the Oval Office, the targeting of career officials and questioning of the quality of their work and their patriotism. It is very scary for people who, go to and from work every day, just like you and I do, don’t have any special protection and find themselves very vulnerable, not just to trolls online, but to anyone who might choose to take those words as an inspiration to do harm. 

Sahar was an Iran expert who had served, as almost all public servants do, for the previous administration. And her national origin is Iranian. And so there was a very troubling, I think, implication that her loyalty was suspect, both because of her work for the Obama administration as well as her background. 

The report concluded that, in fact, she had been mistreated and that there were high-level officials, including the current envoy for Iran, Brian Hook, who is at the time the director of policy planning, who had — based not on merit, but on these other reasons — sidelined her from her duties and had her reassigned. 

Absolutely. I would say that we’ve seen a number of cases, not just in Sahar’s case or in Ukraine, of career officials who have been targeted based on either their work, or we have seen this idea of questioning the loyalty, particularly of public servants who are immigrants. Both Marie Yovanovitch and Lt. Col. Vindman, who testified or was deposed by the House impeachment inquiry, recently have seen their loyalty questioned because they immigrated to the United States, which is really disturbing, I think, to those of us who have served alongside people like Masha (Yovanovitch) and understand that their patriotism comes, if anything, from a deeper place because of having experienced other systems that don’t have the freedoms and the values that the United States has.