The Trump administration reportedly is preparing to halve the State Department’s budget and, in one of the most far-reaching reorganizations in the department’s history, both close nearly every U.S. Embassy in Africa and eliminate the State Department’s nearly 70-year-old Bureau of African Affairs. In its place, the State Department would empower a special envoy who would roam the continent on specific missions that might span the continent’s 54 recognized countries.
While Secretary of State Marco Rubio denied the reports, he may simply be ignorant of President Donald Trump’s plans. Rubio increasingly appears no more in charge of U.S. foreign policy than the secretary of agriculture is. The real power over policy and departmental reform in the Trump administration rests in the White House and among a coterie of aides close to the president. Rubio appears to be like James Woolsey, former President Bill Clinton’s director of Central Intelligence. When a small Cessna crashed onto White House grounds in 1994, pundits joked it must have been piloted by Woolsey because the CIA director had no other way to get into the White House.
The State Department desperately needs an overhaul. Both the placement of embassies and consulates and the broader role of diplomats are better suited to the 19th century than the 21st. Trump is right that the State Department does not need so many consulates in Canada. If the matter is urgent, it is easy to reach back to the United States. If more complex, Ottawa is no longer a weeklong wagon ride away, but at most a four or five-hour flight.
The same dynamics are true regarding Europe. There is little that occurs in European politics that news sites available online do not cover, so political officers’ memoranda of conversation are irrelevant. Replacement passports can be delivered by courier, while roving consular officers can visit imprisoned Americans in multiple countries.
Where political intelligence is most crucial is in Africa. Africa today is the epicenter of a great game for influence, business, and rare earths. To abandon Africa is to forfeit supply chains to China and Russia and to remain blind to the growing Islamic State presence in the vacuums left by poor governance in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique.
That does not mean transnational or subject-oriented envoys are a bad thing. Just as think tanks grew upon the failure of universities to ground themselves in reality or teach traditional security studies, so too does the U.S. government increasingly rely on special envoys because of the failures of many diplomats and dysfunction within the State Department’s policy process.
If the European Union wants to be treated as a real entity rather than an excuse for a bureaucratic orgy, then Trump should call its bluff and locate a single U.S. Embassy in Brussels to cover the entirety of the EU, with a few consulates scattered throughout the region — in Athens, Warsaw, Paris, and Berlin, for example.
With the money he saves, he should then open consulates in major Asian and African cities that have strategic importance to the U.S. Bangalore is the hub of India’s tech industry. It should have a U.S. presence. Rwanda, the closest thing Africa has to Singapore, punches above its weight not only in technology but also in security, helping counterterror missions from Mozambique to South Sudan to Benin. A U.S. Consulate in Somaliland would provide more value in a single day to American security than the U.S. Embassy in Slovenia does in a decade.
STATE DEPARTMENT REVOKING ALL VISAS FOR SOUTH SUDANESE AFTER COUNTRY REFUSES DEPORTATION EFFORT
Trump could work wonders by dispensing with the traditional political, economic, and consular divisions and instead sending a religious freedom officer to Nigeria, whose government has renewed a genocide against the country’s Christians. He might also send a diplomat to Ambazonia, the English-speaking region of Cameroon, whose 92-year-old dictator will soon fall.
Indeed, rather than preemptive surrender to China on the continent, Trump should demand Rubio reassign diplomats living on the taxpayer dime in Europe to Africa so that they outnumber their Chinese counterparts two to one. It’s time to engage and win over Africa, not surrender it to the Chinese Communist Party.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.