Hard power
Still, some State Department employees are anxious their departments could be merged with others, while some fear entire bureaus could get axed for focusing on areas — such as climate, human rights and refugees — that don’t align with Trump’s “America First” approach.
One European official said communication with their US peers on climate diplomacy had completely broken down.
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy blueprint, which was led by the current White House budget director Russ Vought, previously warned that “large swaths of the State Department’s workforce are left-wing” and that the agency needs to be “meaningfully streamlined.”
In Africa, the administration‘s move to freeze all foreign aid and then cut 83% of contracts administered by the United States Agency for International Development means Washington has effectively ghosted hundreds of partners on the ground, some of whom had been working with the US for decades.
South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool has been declared ‘persona non grata’ after criticizing the Trump administration. Rasool had also complained that he had no one to deal with at the State Department’s Africa division.
US diplomatic envoys in several European cities say they have scaled back on attending and hosting cultural events that were long a soft power tool for cultivating influence.
There has also been a broader collapse in trust, the official said, where long-established confidentiality among foreign ministers could no longer be relied upon in G-7 settings, especially on sensitive issues like Gaza and Israel.
Some traditional allies are even considering revising their stance on intelligence sharing with Washington, according to officials familiar with the matter who, like others cited in this article, were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
In practice, given the level of integration, it’d be difficult for some allies to alter intelligence sharing with the US, with some standing to lose with such a move.
The difficulties in maintaining any semblance of a solid US foreign policy have spilled into the public realm, with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio canceling his meeting with EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas at the very last minute, due to “scheduling issues” when she was already in DC and had publicly announced the meeting.
“It’s total improvisation,” Grand, the former NATO officials, said. “Everything depends on the president’s moods.”
