With the Biden administration’s core foreign policy team in place, who will the president nominate to fill high-profile ambassador postings? In mid-June, President Biden announced a slate of nominees — including former interior secretary Ken Salazar for ambassador to Mexico and world-famous pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger as ambassador to the International Civil Aviation Organization.
Similar reports that the president intends to nominate former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel as ambassador to Japan sparked criticism that Biden is more focused on rewarding political allies than improving U.S. diplomacy. “Sending the fashion designers and the movie moguls to London and Berlin … is more worrisome and problematic now than it has ever been,” a former Foreign Service officer observed.
Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.) memorably described political ambassadors as “ticking time bombs moving all over the world.” While political scientists note that presidents often nominate political ambassadors more for their loyalty than experience, my research suggests that political appointees have no negative effects on foreign policy, especially issues of war and peace.
Political ambassadors are a familiar feature of American diplomacy
Turning to non-career ambassadors is not unique to the Biden administration. Despite more than a 100-year effort to professionalize its diplomatic ranks, the United States continues to appoint a mixture of career diplomats and political appointees to serve as its envoys abroad. About two-thirds of U.S. ambassadors are drawn from the career Foreign Service, following a rigorous State Department selection process. The White House and the Office of Presidential Personnel select the remaining ambassadors.
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Whether drawn from the career or political tracks, all ambassador nominees must sit for hearings in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, before the Senate votes on confirmation. For this reason, presidents are more likely to nominate political ambassadors when they face less partisan opposition in the Senate — overall, though, about 94 percent of political ambassador nominees ultimately gain confirmation.
Presidents are also more likely to pick political ambassadors for relatively placid foreign posts, the research shows. Political ambassadors tend to be overrepresented in wealthy and democratic countries, particularly in Western Europe. These postings do not necessarily insulate political ambassadors from criticism. Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets and President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, came under scrutiny after he reportedly made sexist and racist comments to his staff.
What’s the benefit of appointing political ambassadors?
While political ambassadors can generate controversy, presidents have good reasons to pick them for these posts. In general, presidents use these postings to reward loyalty. Some presidents reserve posts for personal friends or political confidants, while others reward campaign donors or party insiders. On the financial side, studies have shown that individuals who make larger financial contributions to presidential candidates or their political parties tend to get nominated to more desirable posts.
Political ambassadors typically bring far less experience to the job than their career counterparts. On average, they have worked fewer years overseas and have less competency in the principal languages of their host nations. They also have less familiarity with international diplomacy and are less likely to have served as an ambassador in a previous post.
But political ambassadors actually perform better than expected
Given their relative inexperience, many observers fret about the continued U.S. reliance on political ambassadors. In a widely cited 2015 report, the American Academy of Diplomacy warned about “the practice of appointing political ambassadors without appropriate experience or credentials.”
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Yet there’s little evidence that political ambassadors harm American diplomacy. A recent study drawing on reports issued by the State Department Office of Inspector General, for instance, finds that political ambassadors “perform worse generally than career diplomats” on important tasks, including “embassy reporting quality.” But it’s possible that career ambassadors earn higher marks simply because they’re better at operating within the unique culture of the State Department, rather than because they provide tangible diplomatic benefits.
In research forthcoming in the journal Foreign Policy Analysis, I examined whether countries with political ambassadors were more likely to get involved in a military crisis with the United States. To account for the fact that the State Department sends different kinds of ambassadors to different kinds of postings, I used a statistical technique known as matching, where I paired countries together based on the probability that they would experience a crisis with the United States, and then compared how political and career ambassadors performed across similar kinds of embassies.
Surprisingly, host nations with political ambassadors were less likely to experience a dispute with the United States. Yet not all political ambassadors performed the same. Those who had worked in politics or the military were less likely to experience crises than those drawn from business or law backgrounds.
Political ambassadors with a personal connection to the president were also less likely to find themselves embroiled in crises than those who were relative outsiders, perhaps because they could more credibly convey the president’s wishes.
Political ambassadors can bring some unexpected benefits
These findings suggest that political ambassadors are not the political liability their critics make them out to be. And political ambassadors familiar with the institutions of government — and who have the ear of the president — will tend to perform better than donors or fundraisers.
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From this perspective, Biden’s preference for nominees like Salazar and Emanuel may actually be quite sensible. By placing skilled politicians with close ties to the president in crucial positions, Biden is using political ambassadors to send important signals about his foreign policy priorities.
Of course, there are compelling reasons to appoint career ambassadors, too, such as boosting the morale of the institutions and people that conduct the lion’s share of U.S. diplomacy. Foreign Service officers probably read Biden’s announcement in April that he was tapping nine career diplomats for key ambassador positions as this kind of restorative effort.
But when it comes to striking the right balance in American diplomacy, the wise approach might not involve efforts to cap political ambassadors at a particular number, but rather trying to match the right kinds of people with the right posts.
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Paul K. MacDonald (@pkmacdonald) is associate professor of political science at Wellesley College and co-author, with Joseph M. Parent, of “Twilight of the Titans: Great Power Decline and Retrenchment” (Cornell University Press, 2018).