22 JULY-AUGUST 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL deliver for its people. The Information Age has fueled truth decay and polarization, generating major swings in the U.S. political landscape between hardening progressive and conservative poles as the moderate middle seemingly disappears. Infrastructure projects are mired in regulation; social benefit and health systems have become so byzantine as to be impossible to navigate; and real crises like affordable housing are convenient to acknowledge but inconvenient to resolve. With these challenges at home, it is evident why Americans have been frustrated with the conceit of our nation-building experiments overseas in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. The United States and its allies pursued a seductive but ultimately flawed theory: that democracy could be delivered from the outside in, installed through military force, constitutional drafting, and elections held before the deeper cultural, institutional, and civic foundations that sustain self-governance had been laid. What followed were two decades of tragic miscalculation, in which we relearned the painful lesson that democracy is not an export. It is a living culture, built over generations through civic education, independent institutions, and the slow accumulation of trust between citizens and their government. Democracy at Home, Diplomacy Abroad The health of our democracy at home has inevitably affected our ability to conduct effective foreign policy abroad. In 1947, at the start of the Cold War, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asserted that “partisan politics must stop at the water’s edge.” Together, Vandenberg, a Republican, and the Democratic Truman administration forged bipartisan support for the Marshall Plan, the very foundation of the unprecedented 80 years of peace and democratic expansion that followed. A year earlier, in 1946, George Kennan penned the Long Telegram to warn: “Much depends on the health and vigor of our own society. This is a point at which domestic and foreign policies meet. Every courageous and incisive measure to solve the internal problems of our own society … is a diplomatic victory. [T]he greatest danger that can befall us in coping with the problem of [authoritarianism] is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.” Over the past two decades, America’s career nonpartisan diplomats have experienced the dangers about which Kennan warned. Certainly, the challenges to our democracy and our foreign policy are not the product of one party or one leader. They are myriad and deepening, although vastly accelerated in the past year. For example, our government’s budgetary challenges have negatively affected our foreign policy. The modern budgetary process began in 1976, but the past 15 years have witnessed far more frequent government shutdowns of much longer duration within a far more politically polarized context. During these shutdowns, our diplomats must focus on preparing for the confusion that ensues instead of on the diplomacy they would otherwise be conducting. Our nomination and confirmation process for presidential appointees is sclerotic and largely broken, especially for nonpartisan career ambassadors. Long gone are the days when a panel of career diplomats with decades of service would sit before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a speedy hearing and a timely confirmation. As well, the number of political appointee ambassadors has steadily increased to a percentage today most modern democracies find jarring. This is not to diminish the contributions of extraordinary political ambassadors. It is simply to note that the balance between political and career appointments and the backgrounds of the political appointees has shifted in ways that have depleted the depth of experience that effective diplomacy requires. Today an unprecedented 100 or more U.S. missions abroad do not have a Senate-confirmed ambassador. And our strategic adversaries, China and Russia, are taking full advantage of that vacuum in U.S. leadership. Most worrisome are the moments in which public servants are the subject of scorn for political gain. Phrases like “deep state” are as cynical as they are corrosive and a deliberate effort to delegitimize the very people whose expertise and integrity our diplomacy depends on. Nonpartisan public servants swear their oath to the Constitution and to the system of government it created. It is a dishonor to their sacrifices to suggest they want anything other than America’s enduring strength, the cause to which they have dedicated their lives. For Foreign Service members, the gilded names in the Department of State’s lobby of colleagues who made the ultimate sacrifice are a daily reminder of their dedication to our country. A consistent and reputable body of polling data shows that many Americans do not trust their government and do not believe our democracy is working.
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