"Everyone Is Horrified by the Way Things Are Being Done"

A State Department insider's thoughts on US foreign policy

If you’ve so much as glanced at the news since Trump took office for his second term, you know that US foreign policy has rarely felt so unpredictable. From a covert operation to capture the president of Venezuela, to an obsession over acquiring Greenland and strained relationship with our NATO allies, to what feels like the ancient history of 2025 — dismantling the US Agency for International Development, imposing tariffs on countries around the world, and bombing nuclear facilities in Iran — Trump’s first year back in office has seemed, at least to me, like a massive departure in speed, magnitude, and direction(s) from the foreign policy and diplomacy of administrations past.

To find out whether things really have been as different as they seem or I’m just suffering from recency bias. I spoke with former US Ambassador A. Elizabeth Jones, who served 40 years in the diplomatic service under nine presidential administrations, about her views on this past year of foreign policy.

US Ambassador A. Elizabeth Jones at the Taj Mahal

The first thing to know about Ambassador Jones is that she is extremely cool. So cool, in fact, that she was the inspiration for the popular Netflix show The Diplomat, starring Kerri Russell. (Debora Cahn, the series showrunner, has described Jones as a “superhero in a pantsuit.”)

The second thing to know about Ambassador Jones is she has held all kinds of high-ranking positions in the State Department, including that of career ambassador, the highest rank there is. She’s served across the Middle East and Europe, including as the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia and the US ambassador to Kazakhstan. Most recently, she ran the US embassies in India and in Egypt (with her post in Cairo happening to begin on the day of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas on Israel).

The third, and by far the most exciting, thing to know about Ambassador Jones is that she is my aunt. Long before I knew she was a big deal, she was my generous, funny, loving, and wise “Auntie Beth.” She’s basically the person holding the rest of the hooligans in our family together, and she’s one of the few people in the world who still send me birthday cards (ahem to everyone else).

I am thus thrilled, and extremely biasedly so, that she agreed to talk with me for The Preamble about US diplomacy and foreign policy in President Trump’s second term. I hope you find her comments as informative as I did. And also, you’re all invited to Thanksgiving.

(The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)

Andrea Jones-Rooy: First, please say hi to my uncle and cousins for me. Second, do you think you’re going to come out of retirement again, or are you sick of this back-and-forth?

Amb. Auntie Beth Jones: I’m by no means sick of it. I absolutely love the work. I think the chances that I will come back under Trump are way less than zero. Not least because I wouldn’t go, but they wouldn’t want me, either. But if something happens and there’s a different person in the White House and there’s some need, I would certainly consider it.

Andrea: How is the Trump administration different from the other administrations, Republican and Democratic, under which you’ve served?

Amb. Jones: For us in the Foreign Service, the mantra was always: political divisions end at the water’s edge. As soon as it’s an overseas issue, the United States is united. Of course, we do what the boss says, which is the White House, but that was always tempered by a huge amount of discussion in the interagency [process, in which different government agencies and departments coordinate their activities,] as well as by Congress. Congress has always had a big say in foreign policy, of course, until now.

Andrea: From the outside, it seems like the US has decided that extended discussions and deliberations about foreign policy are out the window.

Amb. Jones: That’s what it looks like to me, too. There’s no internal interagency discussion about any of these issues, as far as I can tell. Instead, there’s a diktat from the White House, from [White House Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller or [Special Envoy] Steve Witkoff or somebody, and then [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio and all those guys, they just salute and go do what they’re told to do without any consideration for what that might mean in terms of: Does it comport with the NATO doctrine? The NATO agreement? The NATO charter, or anything? There’s no reference to international law or practice or US law or practice.

Andrea: Do you have a sense of what day-to-day life has been like for career Foreign Service officers over the past year?

Amb. Jones: It depends on which part of the building or which part of the organization they’re in. My impression is that the people who are overseas are better off in the sense that it’s harder for the guys in Washington to reach in and dictate their day-to-day. So their life is dependent on who’s in charge at their post. Of course, the countries that are not in the headlines are the ones easier to manage in a situation like this.

As for the people in the State Department [in Washington], it depends on in which bureau they are. For example, the people on the Russia desk have a much harder time than the people on the, let’s say, Azerbaijan desk.

And then the few people that I know who are still in, who are at relatively senior levels, tell me they spend a tremendous amount of time walking around the building, going to see people and just sitting down with them to encourage them to keep working and keep trying to represent the American people in the way that we are used to representing the American people. That’s always the way I thought about it, that the American people were my client.

Andrea: How do the funding cuts and staff reductions carried out by DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency] fit into this?

Amb. Jones: The whole DOGE thing was just numbers. There was no discussion about what were the policy goals or the expertise that would be needed to do any of the things that they said they wanted to do.

Andrea: Are there people in the State Department who are excited about what’s been happening during this past year?

Amb. Jones: From everybody that I know — and I’ve had a chance to talk to quite a number of people; in fairness, a lot of them are women — everyone is horrified by the way things are being done.

Even though everyone agrees changes are needed, there’s nobody who thinks that the way the change has been done was the right way.

Andrea: What changes are needed?

Amb. Jones: One of the changes that a lot of us have talked about is that there were way too many policy silos in the State Department, which made it difficult to move forward.

For example, yes, we want to do human-rights issues. Yes, we want to do religious-freedom issues. Yes, we want to do trafficking-in-persons issues. But they shouldn’t cancel each other out. If a country didn’t get the right score, for instance, for trafficking in persons, the assistance programs [for other initiatives] would be taken away. So we need changes so that we can pursue goals in a way that could actually change behavior in the way that makes sense for these countries to be more effective participants in the international community.

Andrea: Do you have a sense of what life is like for people working on some of the high-profile and fast-changing issues, like Greenland? Are they briefed ahead of time, or are they finding out what’s going on in the news like the rest of us?

Amb. Jones: From everything I’ve read and heard from those who are working on this, they have zero clue what’s going to happen next. And that’s not just because they’re left out. There also isn’t a policy process that would tell them what is intended.

For example, my belief from everything I’ve heard so far is that Trump goes to Davos and nobody knows what he’s going to say, except maybe Stephen Miller, though I’m basing this on my own assumptions. I also assume Rubio doesn’t know. Witkoff doesn’t know. Even Trump doesn’t know what he’s going to say. That’s part one.

Part two, I believe that Trump, in a face-to-face discussion with the other NATO members, backs down to a degree. Just like with Putin in Alaska, he agreed with everything Putin said. If he is confronted by the French, the Germans, the Brits, and the Canadians in Davos, he might say, “Yeah, okay, well, that’s a good idea.” So my guess is that’s where the whiplash comes from.

It’s not that anybody has said, “Mr. President, here’s our Plan A, and here’s our Plan B. This is what our negotiating position is, but we can accept this, or we can accept that.” That was always the way it was done, and there’s nothing like that now so far.

Andrea: So now you go in and you don’t even know what the policy position is.

Amb. Jones: There is no policy. I mean, “policy” is the wrong word for Trump. It’s position. That happens to be the position he takes a nine o’clock, and at eleven o’clock it might be something different. There’s nothing that hangs together in terms of a policy.

Andrea: Is there damage that’s been done in the last year, for example with our relationships with our allies, that you fear cannot be undone?

Amb. Jones: It’s a good question, and something that we all debate among ourselves all the time. No, I’m in the camp that the damage is personality-driven, not policy-driven. And that a different personality can start to get it back. Will there ever be huge trust? Probably not.

But you know what? We always had a problem with trust because of Congress. I mean, how many times in my career did we say, “Yes, we’re going to sell you F-16s,” and Congress said, “No, we’re not”? Even 20 years ago, people said, “We can’t really rely on the US.” We said, “Yeah, but, you know, that’s the way democracy works.”

The question, I think, is, if we want to get it back, which we do, are there think tanks or organizations in place now who are doing exactly what Stephen Miller and the Heritage Foundation did [i.e., planning policies for the next presidential administration]? We need to start out with, okay, this is what we are going to do on day one, this is what we are going to do on day two, to get things back. Are we going to rejoin the WHO [World Health Organization]? I hope so. And so on.

But the other part of all this is that we’ve been talking about foreign policy, but a lot of our credibility rested on our behavior at home. So we used to be able to argue that press freedom is sacrosanct, that human rights are sacrosanct, that the citizen has rights, and that the rule of law is the rule of law. That’s where our credibility is gone. That is going to be the more difficult thing to get back and persuade our international colleagues that we can be relied on in terms of the way we behave in the United States.

The health issue is also a big one. The kinds of things we led in terms of health issues — HIV/AIDS, measles, polio, smallpox, Ebola — all of that work is gone.

Andrea: Well, you’ve punctured my naïve belief that foreign relations are separate from the domestic mess. I suppose you can’t be a good member of the club if you’re rotting from the inside.

Amb. Jones: One of the things that I used to struggle with, although I figured out how to manage it, is that our European colleagues would say, “How can you preach about human rights when you have the death penalty?” My response always was, “But it’s still under debate in the US. That’s part of democracy. Plus, different states have different laws about it, so each state can decide for itself.” We’d talk about it that way, that it’s part of democracy to discuss it. Gun laws were the harder one to deal with.

Andrea: One of the things that have been striking me, and now I’m harkening back to my undergraduate international relations classes, is that the Stephen Miller view of the world — that the world has changed, it’s violent and power-based now, and it’s every country for itself — feels very old-fashioned. I thought we’d all agreed that it’s better not to live that way, where we’re afraid of all our neighbors and we’re constantly fortifying our borders. Are we on this chaotic ship because a handful of dudes read Mearsheimer on “the tragedy of great power politics” a long time ago?

Amb. Jones: I think so. I feel like I’m back in the Metternich days [of the Austrian Empire] or something. It’s ridiculous. The kinds of things that Trump says — that China and Russia can do what they want, and we should be able to do what we want, that we own the Western Hemisphere — are nuts. It’s crazy.

This whole business undercuts or belies the entire US philosophy that soft power is a critical element to power. We had convening power [to bring different groups together and form partnerships].

When Trump was elected the second time, one of the things I said to a ton of my German, French, British, and other friends is: “You need to step up now. It’s up to you to lead because we’re not going to. You’re not going to like what’s going to come out of Washington.” And that was when I had no idea it was going to be as bad as it is. “But we’ve been working together on all this stuff, and you know what to do. So now you step up.” And they have.

Andrea: As we wind down, a super easy and lighthearted question for you about Venezuela. What do you make of our recent operations there?

Amb. Jones: I was very impressed in a very negative way when Trump said, in effect, “Of course we did that. We own the Western hemisphere, and we get to do whatever we want.” My first thought was, “My God, that gives Putin the idea that he can take over the Baltics — not just more of Ukraine. And certainly it gives China the idea they can take over Taiwan.” So I saw it as a threshold that had been crossed because of the way he talked about it, not necessarily because he did it.

I also thought, “Okay, well, we went into Grenada. We went into Panama.” I was trying to understand for myself why I was so disturbed by the Maduro operation. The difference was, I know there was an interagency process that decided to undertake those activities in Grenada and Panama. They weren’t done because a Stephen Miller–type person said, “Let’s go get that guy.” For me, that was one of the biggest problems.

Andrea: You’ve dealt with a lot of leaders from a lot of not-so-democratic countries. How do we compare right now?

Amb. Jones: One of the things I think about a lot is the kinds of things that are going on with the US now — Minnesota, Venezuela, Greenland, the icing out of journalists, ICE — these are all [similar to] issues that I used to report on from all of the authoritarian dictatorship countries in which I served, and I served in a lot of them. And it’s exactly the kind of thing that we would report on to say, “My God, this country is going to hell.”

Andrea: Does anything give you hope at this stage?

Amb. Jones: Several things. First, the number of people out in the street protesting. And the number of Americans escorting kids to school because their parents are afraid to. The number of volunteers that are taking groceries to families that are afraid to go to the grocery store. All this volunteer work.

The other thing that I think is encouraging is the couple of Republicans who have broken with Trump because of the Epstein issue, as well as the various Republicans who’ve been pretty surprisingly negative about the administration’s defending of ICE in Minnesota.

I’d also like to think that eventually some of the members of Congress will say, you know, what’s going on with Greenland — we’re not going to destroy NATO over this. Because that’s what it would do. I mean, it’s impossible for me to imagine that we would do something so insane as to go against the organization that we helped create.

Andrea: Is there any advice you have for those of us who are not in the State Department but want to help?

Amb. Jones: Those who have insights into various foreign policy issues or particular countries should continue to learn the language, look for opportunities, think tanks, university groups, or whatever it is, to think about ways to develop policies that make sense for relationships between the US and these countries, or with a whole group of countries like NATO, or the UN, or Africa, whatever it may be.

Be ready to write about it, speak about it, and jump in when the opportunity arises to actually implement some of those policies. But don’t walk away from foreign policy just because it’s a mess right now.

It’s terrible. But we can get it back. That’s the short version.

Andrea: There we go. We could have just said that and then played cards.