Kissinger wanted to fire half the diplomatic corps. I dealt with one in the mid 70’s in Bangkok. A real asshole.
“Kissinger wanted to fire half the diplomatic corps. I dealt with one in the mid 70’s in Bangkok. A real asshole.”
Keep in mind that most come out of the “Kennedy School of Government” at Harvard and other similar ‘upper crust’ backgrounds - so yeah, you got a taste of what the rest of the world has to deal with, when it comes to diplomacy with the US.
Hopefully those days end too.
What is the need for them in the modern world? The expensive onsite diplomats and their luxury travel are an anachronism when you have Zoom, Microsoft Teams and the IPhone. They can probably dismiss 80 percent of them.
They are bad people.
Another thing to shake things up: demand all records from DSS about incidents involving Ambassadors or other SES types while overseas. To include going to the host nations and their govt/security/law enforcement/intel apparatus and see if any got caught doing some really nasty or illegal stuff.
IE….sexual tourism overseas, depending on what happened is still illegal in the U.S. and one can be prosecuted for stuff even it happened in India, Pakistan, Thailand, etc