The Trump administration has undermined Washington's ability to understand the world and limited its ability to use diplomacy as it has done before to build relationships, reach agreements that benefit everyone, and avoid and end wars.
Afrasianet - When Donald Trump warned Iran on April 7 that "an entire civilization will perish tonight," a European diplomat in Washington said his government wanted an urgent answer to a troubling question: Was the U.S. president considering using a nuclear weapon?.
Across Europe and Asia, concern has transcended the question of whether Trump's catastrophic threat is serious or merely a promise. One fear, the diplomat said, was that Russia would use the opportunity to justify similar threats in Ukraine, leading to a nuclear crisis on two continents.
European governments immediately sought reassurances through the traditional channel: the U.S. State Department. But according to the diplomat, officials there gave a troubling response: They didn't know what Trump meant or what actions his words might portray.
This previously undisclosed incident signals a historic collapse of U.S. diplomacy. At a time when the United States is led by a president whose actions and decisions are so difficult to predict, who is rocking markets and capitals with his sensational statements, governments around the world are scrambling for clarifications, only to be surprised that the usual channels of communication, whether at U.S. embassies or inside Washington, are absent, silent, or have no information. Worldwide is currently vacant.
Margaret McMillan, a professor of international history at the University of Oxford, said the Trump administration was undermining Washington's ability to understand the world in which it operates, increasing the risk of global instability. "We will not be able to use diplomacy as we have often done before: to build relationships, reach mutually beneficial agreements, and avoid and end wars," she said.
The Trump administration rejects the idea of a collapse, saying the changes have strengthened U.S. diplomacy and streamlined decision-making. "The president has the right to determine who represents the American people and their interests around the world," State Department spokesman Tommy Piggott said.
To paint a more realistic picture of the state of U.S. diplomacy under Trump, Reuters interviewed more than 50 senior diplomats, White House officials and recently retired ambassadors, as well as dozens of foreign officials, diplomats, and lawmakers across Europe and Asia.
As veteran U.S. diplomats are displaced or sidelined, U.S. allies are changing the way they engage with Washington. Rather than relying on embassies or official channels, foreign governments say they are reorganizing their diplomacy to center on a small circle of people who can communicate directly with the president, leaving many relying on back channels to deal with a superpower whose positions have become less coherent.
For now, some U.S. allies believe that the most effective way to deal with a moody president is not to take his statements seriously.
This approach was evident after Trump's threat to annihilate Iran raised fears of nuclear war. In response, officials in Britain, France and Germany drafted what a European diplomat called a "strongly worded" joint statement later that day.
But they chose not to issue it, considering Trump's language as hollow threats and that a public rebuke could prompt him to continue bombing. By evening, Trump had declared a two-week ceasefire with Iran.
The incident, which has also not been made public, illustrates the approach that a number of allies are now taking: restraint rather than confrontation. But diplomats said Trump's repeated disregard for threats is also dangerous because it could limit their ability to respond when a new crisis erupts.
More than a year into Trump's second term, influence and information are increasingly the preserve of a handful of envoys, most notably Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and real estate developer Steve Witkoff, a longtime friend of the president. Kushner holds no official government position, and Whitkoff has no previous diplomatic experience. But Reuters found that some foreign governments are now prioritizing reaching out to them through official channels.
Other countries have sought to open unconventional channels of access to the White House. South Korean officials bypassed U.S. trade negotiators and established direct ties with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who they felt could explain Trump's true intentions in the midst of Trump's 25 percent tariff crisis. Japan found an unlikely broker in Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank, who is playing golf with Trump.
The State Department was an early target in Trump's second term. In April 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the department as an "overgrown" bureaucracy dominated by "extremist political ideology" and announced a "comprehensive reorganization plan."
These efforts were alluded to in the 2025 Project, a political blueprint published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank in Washington.
The plan called for a more efficient foreign ministry with more appointees chosen because of their proximity to the administration or their political leanings, while excluding professional ambassadors whose positions are not in line with the administration's directions.
About 3,000 State Department employees left last year, about half of whom were fired and others accepted offers of resignation in exchange for compensation, roughly 15 percent of the number of U.S. workers.
Then in December, Rubio ordered an unprecedented recall of about 30 ambassadors from around the world.
Rubio promised last year that the restructuring would "empower the department from the bottom up, from offices to embassies." But today, 109 of the 195 positions of U.S. ambassadors are vacant worldwide, according to the American Foreign Service Association, the diplomats' union.
A White House official said the changes "have made our government more efficient, less inflated, and more able to effectively implement the president's foreign policy."
The new structure leaves Washington with fewer senior diplomats on the ground in a key war zone. Five of Iran's seven neighbors, and four of the six Gulf states, are without a U.S. ambassador.
Many U.S. embassies are now run by chargé d'affaires, who are acting diplomats, rather than Senate-confirmed ambassadors, which some countries see as a downgrade of diplomatic relations.
Former U.S. ambassadors and State Department officials said the decline in diplomatic presence contributed to the chaos of the evacuation of Americans from the region when Trump began the war with Iran.
Barbara Leaf, a retired diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to the UAE during the first Trump administration and as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs under former President Joe Biden, said: "These missions should have ambassadors when they're at war. In a moment of crisis that seems to have no apparent end, this administration has left these missions in a precarious situation."
Bigott said U.S. embassies had done well during the war with Iran and were "adequately staffed."
For Bridget Brink, the divide between the Trump administration and its diplomats around the world was a matter of life and death.
Brink was the U.S. ambassador to Kyiv when Trump returned to office. In March 2025, a few days after Trump's dramatic meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, the United States cut off military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine.
Brink said the weapons included air defense munitions that helped protect not only Ukrainians, but also U.S. embassy staff from Russian drones and missiles.
"I had a thousand people, all civilians, on the ground," Brink said in an interview. We were under the protection of Ukrainians using American and other equipment."
She said the halt in military aid came without warning. "When we tried to figure out why it was stopped, we didn't get any answer," she said. Brink reached out to the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House and said, "Everywhere we could go, because we were very concerned about what this meant not only for the Ukrainians, but for our security as well."
Brink said her staff worked behind the scenes to persuade the Trump administration to resume aid, which she agreed to on March 11. But she said she never received official confirmation of why the aid was halted in the first place.
More than a year into Trump's second term, influence and information are increasingly the preserve of a handful of envoys, most notably Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and real estate developer Steve Witkoff, a longtime friend of the president. Kushner holds no official government position, and Whitkoff has no previous diplomatic experience.
The layoffs at the National Security Council, which traditionally coordinates foreign and defense policy in the White House, have strained relations between the Trump administration and its embassies. In 2025, Trump reduced the number of National Security Council staff from hundreds to just a few dozen.
For months, National Security Council staff held no regular meetings and faced a de facto ban on interagency meetings on national security and foreign policy, according to three current and former U.S. officials in Washington.
The White House official said the National Security Council did not halt regular or interagency meetings, but they were smaller and focused on Trump's priorities.
During that time, several officials said staff received little formal guidance on key topics such as the war in Ukraine or the future of NATO. Instead, they were monitoring Trump's account on Truth Social for political signals.
Officials said many National Security Council staff kept Trump's account open on a dedicated screen and responded quickly when he posted posts.
Under Biden, Brink regularly participated in National Security Council meetings to develop and coordinate a complex wartime policy between Washington and the Kiev embassy.
Under Trump, those meetings were halted, Brink said. Instead, she was asked to "just call people," an approach she described as ineffective and unworkable in a conflict zone where Russian attacks were routine. "We're seven hours ahead and we're in bunker almost every night," she said.
She said the straw that broke the camel's back was Trump's policy of "appeasement" on Ukraine, which was to seek closer ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin while blaming Ukraine for Russian aggression.
She resigned in protest in April 2025. Two months later, she announced her candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives for the Democratic Party in Michigan.
The U.S. State Department said on April 28 that her successor, Julie Davis, who served as chargé d'affaires, would also resign and retire in June. Department spokesman Pigott said Davis was retiring after a "distinguished 30-year career" in the diplomatic service.
The terms of many other professional diplomats have come to an abrupt end. A week before Christmas, about 30 diplomats were asked to leave their posts by mid-January, a summons that came mostly without warning or explanation.
Some of the departing ambassadors called him "Saturday Night Massacre" in their private sessions, a Watergate-era phrase now used to describe mass dismissals of officials.
U.S. ambassadors fall into two categories: professional and politically appointed. Both categories are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
Professional diplomats traditionally pride themselves on being nonpartisan and often have decades of experience. Political appointees are typically major campaign donors, former lawmakers, or close allies of the president, and may have little or no diplomatic experience.
In U.S. administrations for nearly 50 years, professional diplomats typically made up between 57 and 74 percent of ambassadors, according to the American Foreign Service Association. In Trump's second term, professional diplomats accounted for about 9 percent of ambassadors appointed, a significant reduction in institutional expertise that has historically led U.S. diplomacy.
Most of the ambassadors recalled last December were professional diplomats appointed to their current positions under Biden, but they also served in Republican administrations, including the Trump administration. For example, Brink, the ambassador to Ukraine, worked with five Democratic and Republican presidents, including Trump in his first term.
The State Department said the mass subpoena was a "routine procedure" and that the replacements would represent Trump and work to promote the "America First" agenda, which the White House says will "defend core American interests."
There are still more than 100 ambassador vacancies around the world. "We are practicing our diplomacy with one arm tied behind our backs," said Brian Nichols, who served as ambassador for Democratic and Republican presidents from 2014 to 2021 in Peru and Zimbabwe.
Against this backdrop, a new group of diplomats aligned with Trump's agenda is emerging, as the Ben Franklin Fellowship, founded in 2024, seeks to identify and strengthen the presence of conservatives within the State Department and counter what its leaders describe as bias against them. "A lot of moderate officials — men, white men — come to us and say, 'I'm completely marginalized because of the diversity, equity, and inclusion program,'" said co-founder Philip Linderman, who was prevalent in previous administrations.
The group now has about 95 colleagues on its website, including Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau. Linderman, a former diplomat, said another 250 members, mostly active diplomats, are hiding their identities to avoid retaliation against future Democratic administrations.
One of the Fellowship's biggest financial backers is the Heritage Foundation, which designed the 2025 Project. Last year, Heritage gave the organization a $100,000 grant, which actually helped move forward with one of the 2025 Project's key recommendations : restructuring the workforce it considers hostile to conservative administrations. Heritage told Reuters that it supports many U.S. organizations but has no "direct control" over them.
The grant is intended to help Trump avoid hiring State Department staff who might derail his agenda, said Linderman and Matt Boyce, another former diplomat, co-founder of the grant and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.
The group organizes networking seminars, recruits members at universities, and advises the Trump administration on professional diplomats it considers ideologically active. "We're helping them know, if they want to, whether someone is part of the resistance," Boyce told Reuters.
Eighteen former ambassadors have expressed concern that members of the Ben Franklin Fellowship are being quickly promoted to senior positions before more experienced people. The State Department "does not make personnel decisions based on participation in outside groups or demographic quotas," Bigott said.
The layoffs at the National Security Council, which traditionally coordinates foreign and defense policy in the White House, have strained relations between the Trump administration and its embassies. In 2025, Trump reduced the number of National Security Council staff from hundreds to just a few dozen.
Trump has increasingly shrugged off embassies and entrusted sensitive diplomacy to special envoys, most notably Kushner and Witkoff, the two main negotiators in the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran.
In the run-up to the war with Iran, Kushner and Witkoff met with Iranian officials in Geneva in late February, but did not bring U.S. nuclear experts with them, according to European officials involved in the discussions.
In the previous nine months, the Trump administration has expelled at least six Iran nuclear experts, including Nate Swanson, a career diplomat who has worked on Iran issues across multiple administrations.
Swanson helped implement the Obama administration's 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. This highly technical deal, in which Iran agreed to significantly restrict its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions related to its nuclear program, was drafted by large teams of diplomats and experts.
Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. Swanson said Whitkoff called him in April last year to ask him to return to join renewed talks with Tehran.
At the time, Swanson was working for the State Department's Office for Sanctions Coordination (OCO).
However, weeks have passed without any meetings on Iran, according to Swanson. Of Witkov, who was also moving between talks on Ukraine and Gaza, he said: "He had a lot of tasks. We didn't have any contribution." Swanson said it wasn't long before the administration "stopped seeking advice."
Less than two months after joining Witkoff's negotiating team, Swanson was fired after right-wing influencer Laura Loomer mocked him on social media as a "relic of the Obama era." He has since joined the Atlantic Council think tank as a senior researcher. Loomer did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
A senior European diplomat said the U.S. team had difficulty understanding the importance of various uranium enrichment thresholds and other elements of Iran's nuclear program during the recent talks in Geneva, forcing European officials to explain them. "How can you negotiate when you don't understand the basics?".
On Feb. 28, after the failure of the Geneva talks, the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran. That day, and again on March 3, Whitkoff briefed reporters on the negotiations.
Those briefings indicated that he had misinterpreted Iran's proposal, exaggerating the Iranian nuclear threat by confusing limited uranium enrichment with near-term weaponization, said Kelsey Davenport of the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based organization that advocates effective arms control policies. Davenport recordings and transcripts provided by participants in the briefings.
Davenport said Witkoff's remarks contained a lot of errors pointing to "technical incompetence." For example, he referred to Iran's AR-6 uranium enrichment centrifuge as "probably the most advanced centrifuge in the world," while not even the most advanced in Iran. "Witkoff doesn't need to be a nuclear expert to negotiate a good deal," she said.
But if not, he should be surrounded by people who know."
Trump's top envoys have also faced scrutiny from Democrats in the U.S. Congress over potential conflicts of interest, Kushner over allegations that he negotiated peace deals with countries with which he has multibillion-dollar business deals, and Witkoff over his family's role in Trump's crypto company, which is seeking to expand in the Middle East.
Both have denied any conflicts of interest.
The White House official called the allegations a "boring narrative" promoted by Democrats and said both men "fully understood" Iran's proposals during the negotiations.
More than 90 percent of the ambassadors Trump has appointed in the state are political loyalists, not career diplomats, and wield extraordinary authority because of their supposed connections to the president's inner circle.
Two European officials recalled how Kushner's father, Charles, the U.S. ambassador to France, confirmed his closeness to power by calling Jared directly in front of his foreign counterparts at a meeting last year.
Trump appointed ambassador to Beijing, another loyalist, former Georgia senator and businessman David Perdue, who echoed Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
Three U.S. government officials focused on China affairs said Perdue contacted Trump directly to make decisions and address outstanding diplomatic issues, while even top U.S. diplomats were excluded from the decision-making circle.
They said that when planning high-level visits, staff members were often The embassy is waiting for Perdue to contact Trump before committing to final arrangements, which is a departure from the norm compared to the past when such decisions were made at lower levels.
Wolfgang Geschinger, a former German ambassador to Washington, said the current U.S. approach reflects an enormous concentration of power on U.S. foreign policy in one person: Trump.
"This person makes decisions, sometimes overnight, sometimes in a formal meeting, sometimes not," he said. "It's completely different, and I'm not sure that Trump's style of decision-making really provides a guarantee of good decision-making."
Some countries are seeking unconventional ways to get to the White House.
In April 2025, Trump announced tariffs on South Korea, threatening its export-based economy. In subsequent trade talks, South Korean officials struggled to determine whether their U.S. counterparts were accurately conveying Trump's position, Kang Hoon-sik, the head of the presidential office, said on a South Korean podcast.
Instead, South Korean officials adapted by communicating directly with Wells, the White House chief of staff.
The usual dealt with the United States on matters of foreign policy, security, or trade, and Wales is not a trade negotiator.
Shigeru Ishibba, who served as prime minister until October 2025, told Reuters that during his tenure, Japan had used the tech mogul as a backchannel to reach Trump, the first time Sun's role had been publicly acknowledged.
Ishiba said Son was largely acting in the best interest of his own business, but confirmed that his government had relayed messages to Trump through Sun.
Ishiba said direct contact with Trump was vital because "the people around him are all sycophants."
Foreign Ministry spokesman Piggott said he "rejects the premise that key decisions were made without meaningful input by experienced professionals."
He described Trump's use of envoys and direct lines to the White House by some countries as effective. "The continued direct involvement of the highest levels of this administration around the world is an advantage," he said, adding that "anyone who claims otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about."
Trump has turned diplomatic norms on its head with a relentless series of threats, directed at enemies such as Iran and allies including Denmark, Canada, and NATO. Governments have been forced to assess whether a public response will calm or worsen tensions.
Trump has turned diplomatic norms on its head with a relentless series of threats against enemies such as Iran and allies including Denmark, Canada and NATO. Governments have been forced to assess whether a public response will calm or worsen tensions.
That was in early April after Trump warned that Iran's civilization was dead. Officials in Britain, France and Germany drafted what a European diplomat described as a "harsh" joint statement, and then decided not to issue it.
"We eventually thought that whenever he barked like this, he wouldn't bite," said the diplomat, who helped draft the statement.
European officials believed a ceasefire between the United States and Iran was still possible, and feared that a public rebuke would prompt Trump to continue bombing.
They refrained from responding. By the end of the day, Trump had declared a ceasefire.
The incident reinforced a lesson for many U.S. allies that silence may be the safest response to Trump's more extreme threats.
Some European diplomats call this the "Merkel way," a reference to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel's quiet reaction during Trump's first term: absorbing provocations without a public reaction while resolutely defending national interests.
A number of allies, including Australia and New Zealand, criticized Trump's remarks on Iran. But others, including Japan, remained silent.
Takeshi Iwaya, a lawmaker from Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party who served as foreign minister until October 2025, said: "President Trump's statements were constantly changing, so over time we stopped responding to every single one of them. "A response may only provoke unnecessary reactions."
