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...