The End of Diplomacy

By mid-afternoon, the gray, windowless corridors of the Harry S. Truman Building, the headquarters of the State Department, feel less like the nerve center of the world’s most consequential foreign-policy institution and more like the catacombs for diplomacy. A disorienting and disheartening quiet has settled in, following last year’s sweeping cuts at State and its sister agency USAID. Today, decisions that once moved through interagency meetings, policy-planning staff, and regional bureaus now seem to drop, fully formed, from a small circle of advisers around President Trump. The traditional (and famously bureaucratic) step-by-step process has been replaced by after-the-fact briefings for the nation’s diplomatic corps, and even those are sporadic.