Whether you look at the reign of a Tillerson, or the “Christian warrior” Pompeo, the GOP leadership destroyed the State Department and it’s having a disastrous effect right now.
Foreign Policy:
Morale has hit rock bottom at Foggy Bottom, as American foreign service officers languish and Rex Tillerson builds a mini-empire.
GovExec:
State Department Says It’s Rebuilding After Trump ‘Decimated’ It, but Will Still Fall Short on Some Key Biden Goals
One simple explanation for why State was ruthlessly gutted and attacked by the White House occupant after 2017 was… to hide extensive executive branch corruption in foreign affairs.
[State] noted that there had been a “lack of adequate recordkeeping pertaining to diplomatic gifts” between Jan. 20, 2017, when Trump took office, and his departure from the White House four years later.
Indeed, attacks on State ran so hot that the White House setup an illegitimate shadow State to block U.S. legislative support for a country defending itself against Russian oligarchs.
It’s obvious who and why the anti-democratic, corrupt oligarchs were gifting.
They’ve been derided as a “deep state,” slurred as “Obama holdovers,” threatened with draconian budget cuts and told President Donald Trump doesn’t even need them. …diplomats have described being sidelined on Ukraine policy as Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and political appointees — apparently at the president’s direction — pursued a “shadow” foreign policy that included withholding some $400 million in military aid to Kyiv. Their boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has attacked [open support of Ukraine against Russia] as “troubling” and defended the legitimacy of Giuliani’s efforts.
This all unfortunately matters a lot right now.
With violence rapidly unfolding in Sudan, the State Department relic — hollowed-out and politically compromised by the GOP — is flailing and failing Americans.
CNN spoke with multiple people whose family members are among the “dozens” of Americans who want to leave Sudan, and they said the State Department has provided “barely any assistance” since the deadly violence between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) broke out more than a week ago.
That fighting between the rival military groups has left hundreds dead, including two Americans, and thousands wounded, and has left the country at risk of humanitarian disaster, as those still trapped in their homes face shortages of food, water, medicine and electricity.
“To be honest with you, the State Department was useless, utterly useless throughout this entire period” […] “It was quite perplexing because I don’t understand how other nations were able to secure buses and evacuate their citizens and devise plans to get hundreds of their citizens out, and we’re patting ourselves in the back for getting 70 diplomats out.”
Not that perplexing. The damage done to State was very real, extremely difficult to undo, and the GOP’s handwork predictably is now killing Americans.
Evacuating all U.S. diplomats and their families while abandoning 16,000 Americans to escape on their own without any diplomatic support is simply un-American.
By contrast, Britain, France and Germany have sent airplanes to Sudan to help evacuate their citizens, and other countries, such as India, have organized convoys to Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
[…]
Bushra Ibnauf, co-founder of the Sudanese American Medical Association, was fatally stabbed Saturday on his way to his hospital. Ibnauf’s elderly parents were not entitled to an evacuation, so he had planned to stay to take care of them…
Reporters have pointed out that State is floating Americans wanting to evacuate by telling them to find a private car, magically fill it with gas, and drive themselves for days next to a bus provided by some other foreign country evacuating its citizens.
In other words, a GOP-drenched kid at the lowly Sudan desk with naive libertarian ideals thinks this is the moment that extreme selfish privatization theory will finally work.
“Seriously, man, what is this?” Khiri asked in outrage. “I am shocked. … Why are you asking us to follow the Turkish or the Emirates bus? How can she drive without a break for 22 hours? I felt humiliated. What are the Americans doing?”
France, Germany, Italy, UK, Spain, Holland, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, Jordan, South Africa, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are just some of the countries that have evacuated their citizens (as well as those of other countries).
Germany is looking like it knows exactly what to do, evacuating 1,000s of EU citizens.
The German parliament, the Bundestag, has given its approval for the evacuation operation carried out by the German military in Sudan, several days after it began. It was a rare, almost unanimous vote in the Bundestag, with 663 in favor and none against.
America however is looking exceptionally selfish and corrupt right now. GOP isolationists have setup the opposite of power projection.
Protecting American civilians abroad used to be a sacrosanct government mission. Now it’s falling to private citizens.
Americans are perhaps lucky State didn’t offer them a privatized evacuation plan based on Trump Airlines (bankrupt) serving Trump Steaks (bankrupt) if only evacuees show up with a truckload of gold bars and take no receipts. Human trafficking by mercenaries as a market-based response to crisis is the dumbest take ever for America.
Kind of like the GOP plans for healthcare, prisons, education, transit… we need to talk about abject failures of over-privatization to protect private citizens: “inaction from profiteers“.
But seriously, even the Marines looking at their Djibouti-based MH-47 Chinook operation supporting a Navy SEAL evacuation of U.S. diplomats are asking WTF about citizens.
If I were to hazard an early guess, based on my own personal reviews of British Foreign Office archives, a xenophobe embedded in State is working this crisis to slam the door in the face of Black Americans as a political stunt.
American citizens trapped by violence and somehow being blamed for their needs while unworthy of help, is something that reads like a page straight out of early 1900s extreme nativist/isolationist handbooks.
Update: The State Department has contracted over a dozen buses, to be monitored by Pentagon drones, as an evacuation path.
The group of mostly Americans — along with some Germans, Norwegians and local staff — were driven on seven buses contracted by the U.S. and monitored by armed drones on the journey, a Pentagon official told NPR. The U.S. government contracted 16 buses total and will use the remaining buses if a second convoy is needed.
These buses are headed to a port for ships into Saudi Arabia. The official statement from State still mixes in some unnecessary victim blame/shame like some kind of game:
We messaged every U.S. citizen in Sudan who communicated with us during the crisis and provided specific instructions about joining this convoy to those who were interested in departing via the land route.
Who communicated with us.
Interested in the land route.
Need they be so tone-deaf?
