As a JO I spent time at a NATO HQs. I would not have missed the education in grand strategy and international organizations for the world. But, for the bureaucracy, it was an idyllic, party going, wife-swapping, do nothing life, with long lunches and short work days. Life sinecure with good salaries + housing and Cost of Living allowances, all tax free if you were on the EU/NATO/diplomatic grift. Sort of like being hereditary nobility if you don’t mind a life of idyl and boredom and booze.
Thanks for validating my information, which quite matches yours.
Stepping back from individual crises, real and imagined, I think it is a worldwide issue that an "administrative state" -- many times not a nation and many times not accountable to authorities unlike itself -- is the soil in which easy corruption grows. And it is worldwide.
Government seems to be becoming synonymous with grift.