Month: January 2026

Just before Christmas, President Donald Trump fired more than two dozen career ambassadors. The action was unprecedented, providing a clear signal that when it comes to diplomacy, Trump values loyalty above all else.

All ambassadors face a persistent tension in their roles – having to represent the viewpoints of the president while also winning the trust of leaders in the countries where they serve. Presidents, unsurprisingly, often favor loyalists, in whom they have greater confidence.

Trump has pursued this to an exceptional degree, making more purely political picks than normal. Of the nearly 70 ambassadors he has appointed to date during this term, fewer than 10% have been career professionals with experience in the Foreign Service.

But as I have argued in my book “Delegated Diplomacy,” there is value in working through diplomats who disagree with you.

A diplomat who unfailingly follows the Washington line contributes little to a bilateral relationship, becoming nothing more than an expensive substitute for a secure phone line. A skilled ambassador knows when to soften a message, recognizes when pushing too hard will backfire, and sees the value in compromise.

At times, this diplomatic approach may sacrifice short-run gains available through more aggressive means. But in precisely those moments when leverage is most necessary, an ambassador who’s established trust can push harder and gain more as a result.

All the president’s men

The idea that U.S. career diplomats place too much weight on foreign interests, rather than putting American, or presidential, interests first, is a perennial suspicion.

Presidents have felt this way themselves. In 1952, President Harry Truman wrote, “The State Department is clannish and snooty and sometimes I feel like firing the whole bunch.” Two decades later, President Richard M. Nixon told Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser and soon-to-be secretary of state, that he intended “to ruin the Foreign Service. I mean ruin it.”

Neither of those presidents followed through. With his mass firing of career diplomats, Trump has come closer. His administration has made it clear that loyalty will dominate its diplomatic personnel policy, with the State Department itself asserting the “president’s right to ensure he has individuals in these countries who advance the America First agenda.”

Not only has Trump weighted the diplomatic corps with political appointees, but he’s often bypassed even his own ambassadors in favor of working informally through members of his inner circle.

The administration’s most delicate tasks, such as dealing with the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, have often been delegated to Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer whose primary qualification appears to be his close friendship with the president, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.

Close personal ties

A preference to work diplomatically through intimates is understandable. Close personal knowledge of the president can provide credibility and weight to an envoy’s word. There is ample precedent for such selections, such as John F. Kennedy’s reliance in 1962 on his brother Robert as his crucial intermediary during the Cuban missile crisis, in which the U.S. ultimately convinced the Soviet Union to remove nuclear weapons from Cuba.

Such ties are likely to be all the more important in the current administration, where the president maintains such an openness to unconventional foreign policy choices. Career ambassadors who know no more about the president’s intentions than whatever the world can read in his latest Truth Social posts may not be able to do their jobs effectively, whether they ultimately keep them or not.

Career vs. political

American ambassadors receive their posts through two tracks. Historically, a minority of ambassadors have been political appointees selected by the president, often as the result of close ties to him. These ambassadors routinely leave their positions when a new administration takes office.

The majority of ambassadors – including those who were recently fired – are career Foreign Service officers, most of whom have spent decades working their way up through the ranks of the diplomatic corps under presidents of both parties. Selected internally by the State Department – but subject to White House sign-off – these ambassadors serve on a nonpartisan basis and nearly always complete their tours of duty, informally set at three years, regardless of presidential turnover.

Diplomats have value to the president precisely because they have cultivated relationships, trust and expertise overseas through a willingness to understand and sympathize with foreign audiences. But this also means that they may rarely be in lockstep with the president’s view of the world. Hence, the friction ambassadors face in their in-between role.

Loss of experience

It is one thing to fire ambassadors who have impeded the president’s agenda in some way; it is quite another to clear them out preemptively as Trump did in December. Ultimately, the loss of the expertise and relationships accrued by career diplomats will likely bite.

Professional diplomats are trained and acculturated to set aside their own views. As former Under Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat once observed, Foreign Service officers “bend over backward to follow every U.S. president’s leadership, even when they disagree with specific policies.”

This is precisely why previous administrations have not fulfilled their fantasies of dismantling the Foreign Service. Truman, despite his contempt, conceded that “it requires a tremendous amount of education to accomplish the purposes for which the State Department is set up.” During Kissinger’s time as secretary of state, the Nixon administration ended up selecting an uncommonly high number of careerists for key positions.

This has not been Trump’s approach. It’s unlikely that will change. He demands loyalty throughout his administration, but diplomats have given him particular reason to think they might flout his wishes. In 2017, a thousand U.S. diplomats signed on to a message arguing that the administration’s travel ban would be counterproductive. A similar number joined a message this year protesting the administration’s closure of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.

Clearly, some officers will dissent so vigorously as to be unwilling to advance certain policies. They can be expected to resign, as many of their colleagues have done already.

But the career diplomats who remain will speak with a louder voice on the international stage precisely because the world believes they are not lapdogs.

David Lindsey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The question the First Amendment keeps asking, across wars and panics and moral crusades, is whether a democracy can tolerate the possibility of persuasion.

There’s a certain school of thought that says no. Persuasion is too perilous.

I call this way of thinking “swallow-a-fly logic.” I’m referring, of course, to the popular children’s song where a woman ingests a fly and then keeps devouring bigger animals to fix it, until she dies from eating a horse.

It leads to the “old lady who swallowed a fly” theory of obedience: If we let someone with a message we don’t like speak out, people might be persuaded. If people become persuaded, they might stop supporting the war, the president, the government, itself. If support evaporates, enlistment drops or compliance weakens as the state loses leverage. If enlistment drops, the government might fall. And if there is no government, then who cares about the First Amendment?

By this way of thinking, free speech is dangerous because the public is too influence-able, and influence is too unpredictable, and security is too precious.

The constitutional tradition of free speech, when it is working at its best, says yes anyway, go ahead and speak. The alternative is a politics in which the state survives by making dissenters illegitimate as citizens.

That’s what happened to Renée Good when she was shot and killed by ICE in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026. Her resistance had made her menacing.

Dissent as a virus

I’m a professor of public service and vice chair of the National Communication Association’s Communication and Law Division. My research examines how news institutions shape civic life and how freedom of expression is both a fundamental human right and a fundamental part of democracy.

In modern First Amendment doctrine, the government usually cannot punish speech unless it crosses narrow lines like incitement.

But when national security is invoked, the rules for speech appear to change. Dissent is treated less as persuasion to be debated and more like a virus to be contained before it harms public morale. That containment logic, either overt or covert, has repeatedly reappeared whenever protest has become politically inconvenient and unpalatable to those in power. It’s the kind of thinking that led to Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension from “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after poking fun at President Donald Trump.

A terror memo. A protest. A killing.

National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, issued by the Trump administration in September 2025, relies on logic from the lady and the fly. It frames “domestic terrorism” and “organized political violence” as national security crises. It tells federal agencies to work together to investigate and stop suspected threats, a framework that enlarges the set of things the state can plausibly treat as suspect, including the freedoms of association and belief.

The language in the memorandum affirms legitimate counterterrorism work while leaving room to treat political dissent as out of bounds. But the First Amendment protects protest speech.

Still, if the language of the Trump memo is somewhat abstract, Minneapolis has provided a brutally concrete example.

When an ICE agent shot and killed Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, federal officials characterized the encounter as an act of self-defense by an agent afraid of being run down by Good in her car.

Local authorities have disputed that framing.

The incident was captured on video that widely circulated and intensified public scrutiny. According to Good’s wife, the couple were protesters who confronted heavily armed agents determined to scare them away. No one tried to run anyone over, she said.

Amid this controversy, the story took a sharp turn. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Good appeared to have been committing “an act of domestic terrorism.” Trump called Good “very violent” and “very radical.”

Reports claim that Department of Justice leadership pushed federal prosecutors to investigate Good’s widow, even as the department declined to open a civil rights probe into the shooting itself.

At least six federal prosecutors in the Minneapolis U.S. attorney’s office resigned in response.

Turning victims into suspects

The state has two choices when a death occurs that’s politically dangerous to the government.

It can investigate the killing with transparency and center the victim’s rights alongside public accountability as organizing principles. Or it can treat the killing as an opportunity to put the victim on trial in the court of public legitimacy.

The second choice avoids holding government accountable, shifts conversation toward the target’s supposed behavior and character, and expands the blame to include the people who loved and stood with the dead.

When this happens, the government does not have to win in court. It only has to keep the stigma circulating by asserting that a particular speaker undermines respect for elected officials. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons Trump offered for Good’s shooting by the ICE officer: “At a very minimum, that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement,” he told reporters.

The United States has been here before. Around World War I, the U.S. Supreme Court issued several free speech decisions in cases mostly remembered as disputes over protest and draft resistance. But their underlying engine was the swallow-a-fly theory. Opposing the war might ruin the nation, so political dissidents had to be stopped, and the court affirmed the government’s right to silence strident speakers.

The Cold War era sharpened the same approach but made it about identity. The Smith Act, passed in 1940, curbed speech that advocated the violent overthrow of the government. In practice, Smith Act cases treated any type of communist sympathy as illegal, presumptively falling outside democratic tolerance.

The government did not have to prove a threat was real and required response. Instead, it had to show that certain ideas were too dangerous to be part of open conversation.

Finally, in Brandenburg v. Ohio from 1969, the Supreme Court went in the opposite direction, affirming free speech rights even for those advocating vile ideas.

The justices overturned the conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader and held that the government cannot punish advocacy just because it is extreme, hateful or possibly perilous. Only speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action” may be quelched, the court wrote. The danger has to be real, and it has to be happening right now. Otherwise, citizens are free to say what they will.

New ways to chill speech

So, if the Supreme Court has settled the issue, why does it feel alive again now?

Contemporary crackdowns rarely present themselves as crackdowns. They present themselves as “coordination,” “threat assessment,” “financial disruption,” “extremism prevention” and, increasingly, as necessary defenses against “domestic terrorism.”

The Trump administration’s September 2025 national security memorandum is exactly the kind of framework that makes these routes attractive, because it invites the state to treat political conflict not as disagreement but as a security threat – something to be managed by the tools and instincts of national security.

Seen in this light, the resignations of federal government attorneys in Minneapolis are not just a bureaucratic drama. They are a window into the government’s underlying theory of the case. Investigate victims and their associates instead of scrutinizing the state’s use of force. Frame the victim’s death as the inevitable consequence of being their type. As Trump said of Good: She was a “professional agitator.”

Minneapolis is not just a tragedy. It is a test of whether the country still backs the central promise of modern free speech doctrine. Government may not suppress speech and association simply because it fears what the public might come to believe.

Stephanie A. (Sam) Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The Trump administration’s recent announcement that it is withdrawing from 66 international organizations and treaties is another blow to the global system where all countries unite to share concerns, agree on rules of conduct and determine agendas for collective action.

Coming on the heels of the U.S. attack on Venezuela – considered a violation of international law – the White House claims, without specific justification, that these organizations and initiatives “operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity or sovereignty.”

Some experts say many of these organizations are niche and peripheral initiatives. They say the groups receive little money from the U.S., anyway.

Additionally, most of the U.N. entities on the administration’s list are part of the U.N.’s main body, the Secretariat, which gets its funding primarily from membership dues that are required by legal obligations. In fact, the U.S. can’t technically withdraw from these groups without leaving the U.N. completely. It can, however, select not to participate in meetings of these bodies or finance them through additional funds.

Moreover, with the White House already defunding the foreign assistance that supported many of these organizations and the U.N. system, regardless of congressional appropriations, this stated withdrawal is unlikely to alter much for these organizations in the short term.

The loss is likely greater to America.

Foreign policy experts assert that leaving empty the U.S. seat at the table will result in an increasingly isolated America and enable its adversaries, such as China, to fill the void.

As a democracy and peacebuilding scholar, and from my years working at the U.N., I know U.S. withdrawal from these organizations also risks undercutting lasting peace and human rights accountability, especially for women and children terrorized by violence and conflict.

Women and children die first

Peace and human rights-related groups loom large on the list of organizations the U.S. has withdrawn from.

The list includes key U.N. bodies that seek to hold states accountable for rape and use of child soldiers in conflict, among other crimes.

The U.N. offices of the Special Representative on Children in Armed Conflict and on Sexual Violence in Conflict are unique global repositories of detailed reporting used by countries, courts and advocates.

These offices can identify violations and trigger action to prevent rape and violence against women and children. This can lead to targeted sanctions against people and other restrictions, national action plans compelling reform, and even international criminal prosecutions.

Additionally, the U.S. will no longer support U.N. peacebuilding efforts. That includes the Peacebuilding Commission and its attendant Peacebuilding Fund. Yet by virtue of its permanent member status on the Security Council, the U.S. is a member of the commission.

Established in 2005 to help countries avoid a return to conflict, the Peacebuilding Commission claims among its successes formerly war-torn but now stable countries such as Sierra Leone and Liberia, which had Africa’s first democratically elected female leader. These bodies prioritize women and youth engagement in building peace.

Also on the list is the United Nations group focused on gender equality and women’s empowerment, known as UN Women. Established in 2010, the agency promotes women’s rights and helps women and girls prosper. UN Women has helped improve laws and policies for women in 83 countries and leads major efforts, including the Spotlight Initiative that aims to end violence against women and girls in more than 25 countries.

More than half of UN Women’s current budget of over US$2 billion for 2026 through 2029 goes to empowering women in war-affected societies and tackling violence against women and girls.

The U.S. served multiple times on the UN Women executive board, which steers the direction of the organization, including between 2023 and 2025. It does this, in part, by approving its strategy, plans and budget.

With the U.S. leaving its seat in steering the organization, Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently said that UN Women has failed “to define what a woman even is.”

With such an adversarial approach, the absence of the Trump administration seeking to spoil human rights protections might be advantageous for these groups in the short term.

But the lack of U.S. financial and political support may weaken these organizations in the long term, eroding their legitimacy and even opening the door for other countries to further undermine their efforts. That might endanger the already politically sensitive challenge of promoting accountability for serious violations of women’s and children’s rights.

‘Adapt, shrink or die’

The specter of the U.S. further abandoning peace and human rights efforts remains.

Rubio said on Jan. 7, 2026, that the administration’s review of additional organizations continues. That reinforces a recent State Department statement to the U.N. – “adapt, shrink or die.”

Some key international and U.N. entities that promote peace and human rights were not on the list, including the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the U.N.’s chief human rights institution – a bully pulpit that has been used sparingly against the second Trump administration so far.

But the U.S. has recently been disrupting long-standing, U.N.-mediated agreements on human rights concerns, including for children.

In 2025, it voted against 38 resolutions in the General Assembly’s human rights committee alone. For example, for the Rights of the Child resolution, the U.S. took the unusual and divisive step of calling for a general vote, even though text had been previously agreed upon. Despite the U.S. “no” vote, the resolution passed, with over 170 states voting in favor.

The Trump administration has also selectively funded certain U.N. peace efforts. For example, of its $682 million contribution to U.N. peacekeeping, it has earmarked $85 million for Haiti – around half of what it actually owes.

It cherry-picked the conflict areas to fund – excluding Yemen, Afghanistan and Gaza – with its $2 billion in humanitarian aid, a steep decline from the U.S. contribution of around $14 billion in 2024.

And it refused to participate in the U.N’s Universal Periodic Review – the only global peer review process for all countries’ human rights efforts. The group’s recommendations, though voluntary, often trigger action to improve human rights. Failure to show up in November 2026 for a postponed review would mean that America becomes the first country ever to undermine this singular means of accountability.

For now, most other U.N. member states are not following suit.

While the U.S. has been able to force changes to language on sexual- and gender-based violence in Security Council resolutions – where it holds a veto – its efforts have gained little traction in the broader body. Losing that language erases years of progress in recognizing that men and boys are also subject to sexual violence and exploitation and deserve international protection.

Most tellingly, the Trump administration’s new Board of Peace – ostensibly for Gaza – appears designed to displace the U.N. itself without reference to the core principles, including human rights, on which the U.N. Charter stands.

From May 2023 until July 1, 2025, the author served in the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance at the United States Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.).

​Politics + Society – The Conversation