Australia and the World Past and Present

Trump has recalled around 30 career diplomats from postings around the globe.

The area hardest hit is Africa.

The view of the Trump administration is that ambassadors are the personal representatives of the President and they serve at his pleasure. They can replaced at any time if that is the President’s wish.

The administration has said that wants representatives aligned with its “America First” ethos.

In the American system, when a new president is elected, all ambassadors submit their resignations. They are accepted or rejected at the beginning of the new administration.

Even before the recall, there were some 80 vacancies.¹ It is hard to see why so many posts would remain unfilled. China, the superpower rival of the U.S., assiduously utilises its diplomatic staff to pursue its foreign policy agenda. Fewer American diplomats means less influence and it creates openings for other nations.

When we examine which ambassadors were recalled, we see that they were operating in smaller countries.

The most senior diplomatic staff in small countries tend to be career diplomats. These are the most apolitical of all U.S. diplomats. They are not rusted on to only one side of politics. They will serve both Democrat and Republican administrations. Such people are probably automatically suspect to Trump. He demands loyalty.

U.S. diplomats swear allegiance to Constitution- and nothing else.

Many of these ambassadors are confused as to why they have been singled out, while others remain in place.

There have been suggestions that Trump may wish to install people closer to him.

As mentioned, most of the posts were in small countries. Middle power countries include Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt, the Philippines and Guatemala. Most of the critical European posts were left in tact. There was no change in China, Japan etc. Nigeria, Algeria and Egypt are all oil-producing states. Perhaps Trump would like more of their oil, or perhaps to be able to restrict how much of it is going to China or even Europe. Still, oil from these countries do not make up a large percentage of current U.S. imports. They are all relatively far from the U.S.. Canada, Mexico and even Venezuela would seem more important to U.S. interests when it comes to oil.

But the question remains, if Trump wanted to install his own people, why didn’t he do it at the very beginning of his term? Why wait almost a year? Perhaps he and his staff needed time to observe the ambassadors in action to determine who to keep and who to jettison. There wouldn’t be much point in installing new ambassadors in year 3 or 4 of Trump’s term as they could just be removed by the next president. Like many of Trump’s decisions, the motivation behind this one is not totally clear. I suspect that his administration took a year to see how the ambassadors were operating before they took a decision. This seems the most logical conclusion. I doubt that Trump would have known all of these ambassadors personally and so I would not be surprised if a shortlist was prepared at a level or two down in the administration.

1. William Bragham and Dan Sagalyn, How recall of career diplomats fits into Trump’s foreign policy shift, PBS News (online), 23 December 2025 ↩︎