> US 'diplomats' are campaigns big donors, or primary supports

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.

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mamonster 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>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.

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Tomte 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Former speaker of the chancellor (and TV news anchor before that) is German ambassador to Israel. Next ambassador will be a career politician.

It‘s not uncommon, though I‘d say even the „cool posts“ like Paris or London usually go to career diplomats.

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bondarchuk 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I know nothing about this but JumpCrisscross seems to use "political" to mean "has donated large sums of money" while your use of "political" is more like.. someone who does politics.

	▲	nxobject 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think they're using it in a technical sense that's idiosyncratic to America: "career" members of the Foreign Service Corps, versus "political" appointees that can be directly appointed at higher ranks, but at the pleasure of the (in turn politically-appointed) secretary. 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.

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Barrin92 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>This is how most foreign services are run

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.