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U.S Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff listens to President Donald Trump speak to reporters on March 9, 2026 in Doral, Florida. | Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images |
As the U.S. launches fresh strikes in Iran, threatens military action in Cuba and pulls troops out of Europe, President Donald Trump is sidestepping formal diplomatic institutions. He’s hollowed out embassies, filled his foreign policy shop with donors, friends and allies — and granted them an unprecedented scope of power.
Earlier this month, Trump appointed Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano — Trump acolytes who lost their gubernatorial bids in 2022 — to diplomatic posts in Jamaica and Slovakia, continuing his trend of doling out ambassadorships to his staunchest allies.
His dealmakers in the Middle East are his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and longtime golf partner, Steve Witkoff. Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, who runs a small trucking company in Nigeria, rose the ranks in Trump’s inner circle. Now, he effectively runs the administration’s Africa strategy. Tom Barrack, Trump’s close friend and confidant of 30 years, is also his ambassador to Turkey — managing a wide Mideast portfolio, negotiating ceasefire talks in Lebanon and working with Syria’s transitional government.
Meanwhile, Trump’s administration is pulling back from career diplomats — nonpartisan foreign service officers, with decades of diplomatic training under their belts. After a sweeping recall of career diplomats in December, 115 ambassador posts are now unfulfilled in nations like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Ukraine.
In over 100 countries now, the U.S. is “less efficiently and less competently represented,” Kelly Adams-Smith, who served for 28 years as a U.S. career diplomat before retiring last year, told Forecast.
“What I see is a diplomatic core that’s being sidelined in favor of connections,” said Adams-Smith, now a diplomatic adviser at American University’s School of International Service. “This is not the way a well-run superpower manages its international relations.”
In a statement, a State Department spokesperson said, “The President has the right to determine who represents the American people and interests around the world, and we eagerly await the Senate’s confirmation of many of these representatives.”
“The Department has confidence in our ability to communicate with our counterparts around the world and advance the national interest. In those embassies without a Senate-approved ambassador, experienced chargé d’affaires lead the missions.”
Traditionally, Democratic and Republican administrations kept a relatively even split between career and political diplomats. Trump is certainly not the first president to pick deep-pocketed donors or close friends to head up U.S. offices overseas (Barack Obama appointed Matthew Barzun, a major Democratic fundraiser, as his ambassador to Sweden, then to the United Kingdom).
But even in his first term, 56.5 percent of Trump’s ambassadors were career diplomats. Now, they make up fewer than 10 percent, according to the American Foreign Service Association.
Most recently, Lake headed up the U.S. Agency for Global Media, a chaotic stint marked by her efforts to dismantle Voice of America. (A federal judge later ruled that Lake was illegally empowered to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that oversees Voice of America.) Mastriano currently serves as a Pennsylvania state senator.
If the Senate confirms their nominations, both will step into their ambassadorships with little diplomatic training.
While Trump chips away at the traditional, meticulous forms of American diplomacy, other countries are taking note. Foreign governments are forging new diplomatic channels to reach Washington — bypassing routine methods like embassies and State Department bureaus to do so.
“You can’t just pick up the phone anymore and have a conversation,” Adams-Smith said. “If you’re a foreign partner with somebody in the White House, what you have to do is figure out, ‘How do I get to Steve Witkoff?’”
“This is what I’ve seen in countries like Russia,” she continued. “I’ve served in countries where things are not transparent, where there’s more corruption, where there are not proper procedures and guardrails in place. That is how we’re conducting foreign policy now. Other countries are seeing that, and they are changing the way they interact with us.”
Welcome to POLITICO Forecast. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at forecast@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at rmisra@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) @riymisr.
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US to pull jets, destroyers and submarines from NATO as part of European drawdown: Washington told allies it will gradually scale down the number of strategic bombers, fighter jets, drones, submarines and warships dedicated to NATO as it continues pressing Europe to do more for its own defense. The announcement was made in a closed-door meeting of NATO policy directors on Friday by Pentagon adviser Alexander Velez-Green, according to two alliance diplomats who were granted anonymity to speak freely. The reductions reflect a long-running effort by U.S. President Donald Trump to pare back America’s role in an alliance he has repeatedly criticized as useless to Washington. It also underscores the administration’s military pivot toward other regions, like the Indo-Pacific.
Rubio says US-Iran peace deal could take ‘a few more days’: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday that the United States and Iran may require “a few more days” to reach an agreement to end the war between the two countries, dampening hopes for a quick resolution to the military conflict that began three months ago. … Rubio’s remarks came hours after the U.S. launched fresh strikes on Iranian targets. U.S. Central Command spokesperson Tim Hawkins described the attacks as defensive measures required to protect troops from “threats posed by Iranian forces.”
Pope Leo demands AI rules to ‘safeguard humanity’ — before it’s too late: Pope Leo XIV on Monday laid out an ambitious vision for regulating artificial intelligence, challenging world leaders locked in a global AI race fueled by military and economic rivalry. In an authoritative papal document known as an encyclical — a papal letter outlining the church’s perspective on a key topic — Leo warned AI could exacerbate inequality, deepen social fragmentation and weaken moral responsibility if not constrained by ethical limits and democratic oversight. The pontiff called on countries to intervene and regulate artificial intelligence to “safeguard humanity,” and urged global leaders to act before the technology outruns political control.
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Four U.S. tech giants — Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta — are on track to spend at least $630 billion on data centers and AI chips in 2026 alone, equivalent to roughly 2.2 percent of the U.S.’s GDP.
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The Grok website is seen on a computer screen, next to a mobile phone displaying its logo on Feb. 12, 2026. | Pablo Vera/AFP via Getty Images |
It all started when Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, generated deepfake photos of two female Cabinet ministers in bikinis last December. Prime Minister Keir Starmer lambasted the incident — then Musk jumped into the fray, reposting a deepfake of Starmer in a bikini as well.
The “tsunami of Grok-generated images would prove to be a catalytic moment” for the U.K.’s online safety regime, POLITICO’s Mizy Clifton writes from London. Previously, lawmakers adopted a “wait-and-see” approach to online safety, shying away from pushing hard-line regulation. Then Grok lit a fire under them.
Before the Grok drama, Britain’s online safety regime was already under strain, but the government was wary of calls to go further on online harm legislation.
Campaigners, who’d started pushing for a return to the drawing board within little more than a year of the country’s new Online Safety Act making it onto the statute books, accused the Labour government of cozying up to Big Tech and the media regulator Ofcom of failing to exercise its new powers …
Pre-Grok, the U.K. government was also clearly signaling that it didn’t intend to follow Australia’s lead in banning social media for children, with a spokesperson for No.10 Downing Street saying in December there were no plans to implement a ban and “it’s important we protect children while letting them benefit safely from the digital world, without cutting off essential services or isolating the most vulnerable.”
Although Musk was initially defiant, X did eventually back down. Faced with shutdowns and threats of legal action, X agreed to restrict Grok’s image-generation function in jurisdictions where sexualized deepfakes are illegal.
Starmer claimed a victory, and he hasn’t stopped claiming it. His hardline approach to Grok appeared to enjoy public backing: polling by More in Common in January, reported by The Guardian, found that 58 percent of Brits thought X should be blocked in the U.K. if it didn’t crack down on AI-generated nonconsensual images.
The fight with Grok and X has become a frequent refrain. As recently as last month Starmer referred to “the fight that we had with Grok” in the Commons. Just last week, Tech Secretary Liz Kendall listed “standing up to Grok and X” as an example of how she is protecting children online.
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