In 2012, when I was in Kabul, I was seconded to the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan. It was my first time working within a military organization, and I knew that first morning when I was the only suit in a room full of camouflage that there was much I didn’t understand about the differences between the U.S. military and the State Department. How we approached problems, especially. My new military colleagues didn’t know what to make of me, either. That led to some long discussions about military power and diplomacy. There was a consensus that they were not mutually exclusive, and best used in tandem.
One evening, a U.S. Army colonel and I dug into what had been accomplished in Afghanistan 10 years into the war. It was an increasingly common topic on the base where I worked, that brought with it inherent frustration. “We’re good at breaking things,” he told me. “We’re not trained to put them back together.” It wasn’t a question of battlefield superiority. It was why hadn’t the Taliban conceded, and why, for all the money that had been poured into Afghanistan, weren’t the Afghan people resisting them more forcefully.
I thought about that conversation and the relationship between force and diplomacy over my career. Generals and diplomats have long understood that complementarity of hard and soft power, that the coercive power of potential military force, can be very persuasive. As I heard increasingly in Kabul and later, “You can’t kill your way out of this.” General James Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary, explained the current situation with Iran as tactical success doesn’t overcome a lack of strategy. (It was also Mattis who told the Senate in his confirmation hearing that investing in diplomacy can prevent conflict. You can read that literally and figuratively against the current backdrop.)
To the point that the White House has a strategy, it seems to be just that. Keep bombing, and eventually, the Iranians will break. Keep threatening escalation, and eventually, they will concede. But they haven’t, and I doubt seriously they will. The people on the other side now are hardliners, motivated by their own survival. They will brutalize Iranians who dare to resist. They will use every bit of asymmetric leverage, especially the geography of the Strait of Hormuz, to raise the costs of fighting to the White House.
Sooner or later, the public threats and performative posturing will have to give way to diplomacy or to the reality of a prolonged conflict that will have increasingly worse global consequences. Our ability to negotiate is going to be handicapped by the leverage lost when the threat of military action went kinetic, by the loss of expertise on Iran and the nuclear issue across the U.S. Government, and by our self-isolation.
Ultimately, negotiations may fail because of distrust, core interests that are too far apart, misinterpretation, or the accumulated weight of the long history between the United States and Iran. Military power unleashed without clear objectives, without thought to negotiating the peace, is a dead end, however. The generals know the situation they’re in. The diplomats are missing or ignored.
The whispers of layoffs that had fed the State Department rumor mill were confirmed. We had watched USAID dismantled in a slow-motion train wreck that upended lives and ended careers. It was now State’s turn. Call them layoffs, or the more official, bureaucratic reductions in force — RIFs — notices were going out beginning at 10 a.m. Washington time on July 11, 2025.
Those posted overseas were safe, at least for the moment. Those assigned to Washington were not.
I rushed home and hurried up the stairs to the room my wife used as her office. We were almost certain she was going to be one of the 1,350 let go. We watched her email inbox, the chime signaling the arrival of only routine messages. Her WhatsApp group was more reliable: notices were hitting inboxes. Two of her classmates got them. She didn’t. I saw the entire list several days later and counted the names I knew. Fifteen talented officers. All of them were good. A few were exceptional. I recognized many other names because the Foreign Service is small enough that you cross paths with a lot of people.
Even before the 2024 election, I had thought seriously about retiring. As one very senior Foreign Service officer once put it, the State Department was the kind of place people worked in spite of the organization, not because of it. It was the way I felt. When I had those moments, I always came back to the work being more meaningful than the frustration of being in a government bureaucracy.
The Foreign Service has been through a series of crises that left real marks. Iraq and Afghanistan. Covid. The first Trump Administration. “Resilience” had become an empty word, overused to the point of meaninglessness. The Biden Administration never met the raised expectations that it could fix a broken organization. Project 2025 laid out the Trump Administration’s intent in black and white.
After Trump was re-elected, I spoke on a panel discussing expectations for the second term and U.S.-European relations. I had worked on Iran during the transition between the Obama and first Trump Administrations, when policy whipsawed with the withdrawal from the JCPOA, and on Russia during the Trump-Biden years, when it was hard to get a coherent answer out of Washington on what our policy was. Some turbulence and drama were inevitable, I said, but things would settle, more or less. I didn’t think actual damage to our relationship with Europe would be long lasting. I might have been saying it for my own peace of mind as much as reassuring the audience. They were skeptical but polite. Their questions said as much. What about tariffs? Support for Ukraine? Women’s rights? Health care and medical research? Climate change? I had no good answers for any of them.
I left admitting my own doubts.
The Trump Administration had made the Deep State a monster under the bed, with a special antipathy for the State Department. When Secretary Rubio told Elon Musk and DOGE hands off, we hoped we would be protected.
We watched DOGE’s excesses unfold and USAID callously dismantled. DOGE ordered us to justify our employment by submitting five accomplishments per week; the State Department ordered us to ignore it. What emerged in the winter and spring of 2025 was a weird silence from Washington. Nobody, at least among career diplomats, could tell you anything because they didn’t know. They didn’t know because they weren’t trusted. All I could say to our team in Brussels, looking for reassurance, was that I had asked the question and hadn’t gotten an answer. The disillusionment hit hard.
I filled out my retirement papers as a contingency. February 21, 2025 was my tipping point. I read headlines that the White House intended a deliberate shift from Ukraine to Russia. I had personally seen Russia’s animosity toward the United States and its cruelty to its own citizens. It was a betrayal I took personally, piled atop everything else that was bad and promising to get worse. I hit send.
Things have gotten worse. Trump is simultaneously outsourcing diplomacy and draining the State Department of its expertise and career leadership — hundreds of senior Foreign Service officers and civil servants have chosen to retire, like me, in a reluctant rush to the exits. The President’s FY2027 budget proposes a 30 percent cut, from $52 billion to $35.6 billion. The proposed Defense Department budget is $1.5 trillion — almost 45 times more.
Those remaining now face a new evaluation criterion. Foreign Service officers must demonstrate “fidelity,” defined as “zealously” executing America First policies. A recently released recruiting video is unmistakably nostalgic, and the underlying message about who they want is clear enough.
Vacancies have become a crisis. Of 195 ambassadorships worldwide, 115 are vacant. Of those Trump has filled, sixty-nine are political appointees. Six are career diplomats.
As my friend and former boss Alan Eyre told The New York Times, “The State Department, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t really exist anymore.”
This is the state of the U.S. diplomatic corps: untrusted, gutted of expertise, underfunded, and without leadership.
I joined the Foreign Service uncharacteristically full of optimism, having made the transition from a jaded journalist, who once spent 45 minutes of my life waiting on a cow for a story. (I’ll write more about that low point soon.) To be a young American diplomat in the late 1990s was to see a world full of possibility and the chance to do great things for my country. I say that without any irony or cynicism intended.
I had gone to graduate school in 1992, having decided international relations offered three things I wanted in a new career: public service, traveling the world, and writing, the one thing I thought I could do reasonably well. Francis Fukuyama’s argument that we had reached the end of history had become the singularly debated question in my international relations program. Western liberal democracy, led by the United States, and a globalized trading system were unchallenged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
When I was looking for jobs out of graduate school, with my specialization in international security, I was told during an interview that I was ten years too late. The Cold War was over. The job market had pivoted to international trade, globalization, and international institutions. The Foreign Service had been an unexpected opportunity.
By the time I retired, the world was becoming more nasty and brutish. From the outset of President Trump’s second term, there were obvious strains arising with Europe, Canada, and other allies. Their access to senior officials in Washington was suddenly scarce. Meeting requests were denied, if there was a response at all. The direct calls or texts between senior officials in capitals, made possible by mobile phones and messaging apps, had stopped. Instead, I was asked by my counterparts to interpret whatever social media post had appeared overnight. I spent the better part of a New Year’s reception struggling to explain to the Danish ambassador and a prominent Belgian official why Donald Trump wanted Greenland.
A few months later, the cracks in the relationship were obvious: the disdain for Europe in the transcript of the Signalgate conversation among U.S. senior officials, the erosion of support for Ukraine, the praise heaped on Viktor Orbán, who had been a thorn in the EU’s side. And subtle. The stories European counterparts told me of a sibling who had become an anti-vaxxer or the 14-year-old grandson who told his ambassador grandmother that women shouldn’t work were attributed to bad influences infiltrating from the United States. This said more in sorrow than anger.
In one of my last conversations with a senior European diplomat, I asked him how much more Europe would tolerate. This was beyond policy differences. It was a realignment of the postwar order. It was a U.S. administration threatening to pick new teams. European patience had to be wearing thin. His answer was tactful, maintaining the professionalism born out of respect for the relationship as it was, when it would have been easy to be cynical about what it was becoming. The allies would have to respect the choices of the American people, he said. He didn’t opine on whether they had chosen wisely.
The administration’s early embrace of far-right parties had worried Europeans that they would have to contend with active U.S. involvement in their domestic politics. My counterparts raised it repeatedly. It culminated in sending Secretary of State Rubio and Vice President Vance to campaign for Orbán, a corrupt authoritarian aligned with Moscow against Europe.
If relations with allies were already strained, the decision to go to war with Iran was likely the final straw, with the President castigating our allies for not offering help that he said wasn’t needed anyway. They have no choice but to deal with the consequences, but it seems certain they have decided not to deal with Washington any more than they have to. If the bridges aren’t burnt, they’re smoldering. “Unreliable,” rather than “indispensable,” may be the adjective being used to describe the United States, and so, they’re moving on as best they can. As The New York Times reported this week, Trump has become so toxic in Europe that left and right politicians there are uniting against him. Orbán’s loss is seen as a defeat for Trump and a break in the far right’s momentum.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned this would happen in his speech at Davos, “We’re in the midst of a rupture, not a transition . . . Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.”
The United States’ status as a superpower was more than its military and economic power. It was its moral leadership. It is arguably still the world’s only superpower but a diminished one. The irony is that the country that Fukuyama held up as ushering in the end of history may find itself on the wrong side of it.
Born in 1883 in Putney, Surrey, England, Attlee grew up pretty wealthy. His father was a successful solicitor in London. The young Attlee did well himself and became a barrister. But the Progressive Era was a thing in the UK as well as Britain (there were a lot of connections in Germany as well) and while the British didn’t really use this terminology, in the American context, that’s what Attlee became. He did a lot of volunteer work and really came to understand poverty. He thought it was outrageous. Soon, he wanted to go into politics to fight against that horror. He joined the Independent Labour Party and became a lecturer in the London School of Economics, offering a very different set of lessons than the traditional British upper class indifference to the poor.
Attlee’s career was briefly derailed by World War I, but hey, he didn’t die. so that was something. When he returned, he became major of Stepney, which was really a village in the East End of London and then in 1922, the district of Limehouse, in the same part of London, sent him to Parliament. Labour was on the rise. Ramsay MacDonald was the first big leader of the party and he became its first prime minister in 1924. Attlee joined the government. He became an important advisor to MacDonald. In 1931, Labour got wiped out by the Tories. Labour was unfortunately in power when the Great Depression hit and the voters took it out on them. A lot of leading Labour politicians lost their seats. I mean, the Tories ended the election with 470 seats and Labour had 52, a loss of 235 seats! But Attlee won his. So he became Labour’s deputy leader and in 1935, it’s leader.
Attlee would lead Labour for the next 20 years. He also made a good move early on. While initially following the common path of pacifism that dominated much of the western world well into the 30s, he took the Nazi threat seriously long before Neville Chamberlain and became a loud critic of Nazi appeasement by 1938, so he could rebuild a lot of support for Labour as the war began. Because of this, Winston Churchill was happy to bring Attlee into the wartime coalition government. But Churchill did not care one whit about domestic policy and would not even discuss it with Attlee.
About Attlee’s importance in postwar Britain, well, it’s hard to overstate this. Although Winston Churchill had become a hero in the U.S., the British people had no tolerance for him outside of the very specific task of leading them through the war. As soon as that was over, almost everyone wanted him gone. He simply had no interest in domestic policy at all and the British people were demanding a robust welfare state. Clement Attlee would provide that. It’s really astounding all that Attlee and Labour were able to do. Of course the most lasting and important and beloved institutions is the National Health Service. No, the NHS isn’t perfect. Yes, it’s a hell of a lot better and more equitable than if you are in the U.S., unless you are super rich. The National Insurance Act of 1946 created a British version of Social Security. The National Assistance Act was a broad based welfare law that helped out the masses of poor in Britain. Labour passed the legislation to build vast swaths of public housing. This was the cradle to grave welfare state that I sure wish we had in the United States.
Labour also engaged in a widespread nationalization program. They started with the Bank of England and the civil aviation industry, but then expanded it to coal, railroad, telephones, and steel. By 1951, the government had nationalized about 20% of the economy, going far past what could ever have been possible in the United States. This was very much not the kind of thing that was some early 20th or early 21st century vision on the left of democratic running of the industries. It was about experts and the state dictating the economy. That’s probably good–a lot of this was pretty efficiently run.
Of course, Attlee and his government was great for unions. There was also the decline of the imperial state. India became free and that was a huge blow for the British ego. But while it was certainly not done peacefully, at the British didn’t fight it like the French did in Vietnam and Algeria. Attlee’s government was also critical in creating Israel, which while understandable in the context of the time, has been a complete and utter disaster for those of us who oppose ethnonationalist states engaging in ethnic cleansing and genocide. Certainly not nearly enough concern was given to the Palestinians displaced in 1947 and that impact resonates to the present.
Alas, in 1951, Churchill and the Tories came back into power after 6 years in the wilderness. Attlee and his other Labour leaders were really old and there weren’t a lot of new ideas after this initial wave of nationalization. The Red Scare was a thing in the UK as it was in the US. He barely won reelection in 1950, with middle class people moving back to the Tories more or less. But still, there was some pioneering anti-pollution laws passed. An austerity budget to pay for Britain’s participation in the Korean War effectively brought down the govenrment. It wasn’t a blowout when Churchill came back to power in 1951, but it was a solid defeat for Labour.
Attlee continued to lead Labour for the next four years, but by 1955, he had led the party for 20 years and it was time to move on. He retired after losing the elections that year to Anthony Eden. In his retirement, he was moved into the House of Lords. There, he was a leader in decriminalizing homosexuality, so good for him for being out in front on this issue. Like a lot of Labour, he opposed to entering the Common Market, the precursor to the EU. Of course now, the positions on Europe have completely switched between Labour and the Tories.
Attleed died in 1967. He was 84 years old. He just didn’t wake up one morning. Not a bad way to go.
Labour today is a complete fraud, a joke of a party that no longer holds any of the principles that Clement Attlee brought to it. Instead, it is more focused on techbros, neoliberalism, and appointing corrupt friends of Jeffrey Epstein to high powered positions than it is on anything to do with a working class it nakedly despises. May it go into the dustbin of history and be replaced by a real workers party that revives the Attlee tradition.
And there’s obviously a lot more to say about Attlee’s legacy, the expansion of Labour’s power, the postwar welfare state, and all of that. So say whatever you want about it in the comments.
Clement Attlee is buried in Westminster Abbey, London, England.
If you would like this series to visit people who promoted the working class cause in the United States, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. There really isn’t a comparison to Attlee here. Maybe Debs, I guess. Any way, Crystal Eastman is in Canandaigua, New York and Jacob Coxey is in Massillon, Ohio. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
Thanks to D. for sending the latest from Logan Circle: “how sad, pathetic and gross!”
UPDATE: The sign has been, uh, updated… check it out:
Regarding Logan Circle construction, ICYMI: Official Word on Logan Circle Park Closing Monday March 30 through June 15th
“Logan Circle is currently undergoing a major restoration and beautification project as part of President Trump’s DC Safe and Beautiful initiative. The centerpiece of the project is the restoration of the Major General John A. Logan Memorial at the center of the circle, ensuring the landmark remains protected and well maintained for years to come.
Additionally, crews are replacing the exposed aggregate concrete walkways, restoring turf and landscaping, installing new irrigation, repairing and upgrading lighting, replacing trash receptacles, repairing benches and other furnishings, and performing tree and arborist work to protect the park’s canopy. The project also includes new iron fencing around the inner circle and repairs to existing fencing.”
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