On the one side you have some diplomats who really are quite capable career foreign policy wonks, appointed in a manner which appears to be meritocratic.
On the other side you have folks appointed, like you mention, as a kind of patronage.
Traditionally, it has been that the softer counterparties (Friendly countries, European allies, small island nations, etc) are staffed with patrons while the more difficult or geopolitically sensitive relationships are manned by professionals, but this is certainly not always true, and one can find many counterexamples.
your location is assigned based on a competitive bidding system where you select from a list of cities to do your next tour. some countries/cities are obviously dangerous for a variety of reasons and they are called "hardship tours" (think iraq or afghanistan). you get bonus money for these and sometimes are forbidden from bringing family.
posts in places like Europe or East Asia are very desirable and highly competitive. but often it's a matter of fit. my dad was a hedge fund manager before the Foreign Service so his first posting was actually in Frankfurt. you can also do a tour in the continental US, such as in DC or NY. because of his economics background he has done a few of those.
most of the time the head ambassador is a political appointee, but the grunts are regular people who have made this their career.
To be clear, there are political and career diplomats, and each administration mixes and matches to its taste. (The current one veers strongly towards political appointees. That is to say, folks who raised money.)
This is how most foreign services are run, with maybe the exception of China.
Absolutely not most. What country in Europe has a significant amount of ambassadors that are not career diplomats / government workers ?
In France, Germany, Switzerland you would either need to be a career diplomat/ foreign service worker or in rare cases you would be a career government employee assigned as diplomat to some specific country for some reason (i.e you were trade minister and become ambassador to your biggest trading partner).
The most "political" appointee ambassador in Europe I can think of is Mandelson but he is (as we found out) supremely connected to US power networks and he is still a lifetime politician/ government employee.
It‘s not uncommon, though I‘d say even the „cool posts“ like Paris or London usually go to career diplomats.
The first might have joined the Foreign Service and worked their way up; the second might have had a career elsewhere (not necessarily in political office), get invited to work for an administration, and then leave once there's a change in power.
Parent is correct. The amount varies from administration to administration. But if you really want to be an ambassador, you're well positioned if you bundle a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars for the winning campaign. (There are traditionally limits. You can't usually buy your way into the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad or London. But for the postings with limited security implications, where the focus is on trade, you're mostly hosting expensive parties for your post.)
It is not. The vast majority of the world has a professionalized diplomatic corps roughly modeled on a Prussian or French system. As Fukuyama points out in Political Order and Political Decay the US is an odd case because it democratized before it developed an administrative state and as a result is somewhere between "Greece and Prussia" and ended up with a spoils-based and clientelist system, somewhat moderated by the Progressive era.
Asking because from my perception over the past 12 months, US ambassadors got more friendly and cordial with some countries (e.g., Japan[0]/Taiwan/South Korea[1]) and less cordial with others (e.g., certain european countries, like UK, that attempt to [imo unjustly] press american businesses that don’t even have any business presence within their jurisdiction).
0. U.S. Ambassador George Glass participated in remarks emphasizing the “new golden age” of U.S.-Japan relations, underlining partnership. (https://jp.usembassy.gov/ambassador-glass-remarks-at-yomiuri...)
1. The U.S. signed Technology Prosperity Deals with both Japan and South Korea in late 2025, advancing shared technology and innovation goals. (https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/10/the-united-state...)
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/g-s1-111302/france-spat-with-...
So in this administration, that would be Epstein clients and co-conspirators. Truly sending the best.
It begins with Benjamin Franklin (well, sort of) and ends with a bunch of campaign contributors (both sides).
Seems like it started some time in the 1990s/2000s and then gradually grew more and more transactional.
For example ambassadors to Georgia (a country that has tensions with Russia) seem to have "better" credentials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ambassadors_of_the_Uni...
And the "diplomats" of this administration is a rogues gallery of Epstein associates (e.g. pedophile sex-trafficking garbage) and self-dealing criminals. Just a who's-who of garbage.
They are sending their absolute worst.
Americans are just blissfully unaware how much their country is being destroyed. It's staggering stuff. Even if you're a super conservative, there should be utter embarrassment and outrage about how incompetent and clownish this parade of imbeciles is.
It won't. But going digitally sovereign will cost Europe tens of billions of euros. If there is a friendly race on the other side of the Atlantic, that will not mean the memories go away. But the urgency of the initiative is certainly sapped.
That will be spent in Europe, improving the economy of member states.
Certainly much better than just sending that money to the US.
Given EU public spending and IT I'm not so optimistic.
At least the money will keep flowing into our own economy, it will hurt but in the longer term it can only be beneficial.
Trump is just the result of this, and it isn't going to stop when he kicks it. It'll be the next populist nonsense. The world needs to move on from America.
Just replace Mexico with America. There must be some Freudian issue going on with Trump here.
I think it's simpler than that: they think the world is a zero-sum game, so why bother being anything but utterly confrontational at every turn?
Of course, that's a childish way to view the world, but we're a childish people.
American diplomats have been doing Trump's dirty work for a some time.
I am more concerned about US interference in elections and campaigning for the far right than lobbying for data at the moment.
The US as the world has known it is gone
https://apnews.com/article/france-us-ambassador-kushner-far-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/18/belgium-invest...
And of course Joe Popolo in the Netherlands:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/11/displays-black...
(He later doubled down on the decision to erase any mention of the racial segregation black US soldiers were submitted to while serving in the army during WWII.)
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/politics/key-concerned-murkiness-...
No the difference is that Trump's ambassadors are directly getting involved in the local politics of their postings. And they're not even hiding it.