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The Trump administration’s recent decision to recall some 30 career ambassadors has launched a new round of handwringing among the U.S. Foreign Service’s old guard.  Washington foreign policy establishmentarians and their media allies are predictably critical of the move.  They reject the charge that some career ambassadors might be out of step with the president, conveniently overlooking examples like Ambassador Bridget Brink. Brink represented the president for four months in Kiev before resigning to run for Congress as a Democrat, particularly denouncing Trump’s Ukraine policy.  She stayed four months under Trump not to represent the president’s diplomacy in that country, but to try to change it, departing only when it was clear she could not.

Oblivious to examples like Brink, John Dinkelman, president of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), went on NPR to denounce stridently the presidential recall.  When asked if some career diplomats might not be enacting Trump policies, Dinkelman said he found such an idea “inconceivable.”  For Dinkelman, Trump’s recall decision is a catastrophe, nothing short of State Department’s Götterdämmerung: 

This is unprecedented. This is unheard of.  This is a sabotage of the American diplomatic machine. This is an affront to the professional Foreign Service that we have spent decades, a century in building in our country.

As a seasoned U.S. diplomat, Dinkelman should moderate his hyperbolic language.  In theory, the organization of Foreign Service officers (FSOs) that he represents is non-partisan, but in practice, AFSA’s leaders automatically align with whatever Democratic administrations want—e.g., Biden’s radical DEI agenda—and oppose Republicans.  In the matter of the recall, Dinkelman’s argument is another version of the constant AFSA complaint that Trump should stop meddling in how the State Department runs foreign policy.  

Consider how Trump’s recall actually works in the field: These 30 career ambassadors will be replaced, in the short term, with other FSOs who will assume temporary leadership as the chargé d'affaires in each affected embassy. The handover process is routine. Whenever an ambassador is physically outside the country he is assigned to, embassy leadership is transferred over to a chargé d’affaires (or simply chargé—the French nomenclature endures in the world of diplomacy).  The chargé is almost always the ambassador’s deputy at post (called the “deputy chief of mission” or DCM), who, as mentioned, is a career FSO.  Whether the ambassador’s absence from post is just for a few days, or permanent, the same procedure always happens: The chargé takes immediate command of the embassy, and American diplomacy continues in that country.