The Diplomat Who Quit the Trump Administration

Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker

For John Feeley, the Ambassador to Panama, moral failings at home seemed to compound tactical failings abroad.

Feeley image from article

Excerpt:

John Feeley, the Ambassador to Panama and a former Marine helicopter pilot, is not averse to strong language, but he was nevertheless startled by his first encounter with President Donald Trump. Summoned to deliver a briefing in June, 2017, he was outside the Oval Office when he overheard Trump concluding a heated conversation, “Fuck him! Tell him to sue the government.” Feeley was escorted in, and saw that Mike Pence, John Kelly, and several other officials were in the room. As he took a seat, Trump asked, “So tell me—what do we get from Panama? What’s in it for us?” Feeley presented a litany of benefits: help with counter-narcotics work and migration control, commercial efforts linked to the Panama Canal, a close relationship with the current President, Juan Carlos Varela. When he finished, Trump chuckled and said, “Who knew?” He then turned the conversation to the Trump International Hotel and Tower, in Panama City. “How about the hotel?” he said. “We still have the tallest building on the skyline down there?” ...

Last December, half a year after the meeting in the Oval Office, Feeley submitted a letter of resignation. Many diplomats have been dismayed by the Trump Administration; since the Inauguration, sixty per cent of the State Department’s highest-ranking diplomats have left. But Feeley broke with his peers by publicly declaring his reasons. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, titled “Why I Could No Longer Serve This President,” he said that Trump had “warped and betrayed” what he regarded as “the traditional core values of the United States.” For months, Feeley had tried to maintain the country’s image, as Trump’s policies and pronouncements offended allies: the ban on travellers from Muslim-majority countries; the call for a wall on the Mexican border; the political bait and switch concerning the Dreamers; the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. As a result, Feeley wrote, “America is undoubtedly less welcome in the world today.” Increasingly, he feared that the country was embracing an attitude that was profoundly inimical to diplomacy: the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must. “If we do that,” he told me, “my experience and my world view is that we will become weaker and less prosperous.” It was not only Trump’s policies that troubled him. In the Post, he wrote, “My values were not his values.” ...

[R]eports were circulating that Trump had referred to a number of developing countries as “shitholes.” As rumors spread that Feeley had resigned because of Trump’s gaffe, the State Department official in charge of public diplomacy [JB emphasis], Steve Goldstein, reportedly leaked Feeley’s letter [of resignation], announcing his real reasons. Afterward, Goldstein talked to reporters. “Everyone has a line that they will not cross,” he said. “If the Ambassador feels that he can no longer serve . . . then he has made the right decision for himself and we respect that.” ...