Comment: The first thing we do is, let's lay off the diplomats
By Elizabeth Shackelford / Chicago Tribune
On July 11, the U.S. State Department imposed sweeping layoffs as part of a large-scale reorganization. Why should this matter to you? Violence is surging across the globe; 2024 saw the highest number of state-based armed conflicts in over 70 years. In our globalized world, instability affects us whether we like it or not.
This means now is a very bad time to undermine our diplomatic capabilities, which is exactly what this will do.
Diplomacy is our least expensive and least risky foreign policy tool, and the State Department leads it. Much like preventative health care, the more effectively we invest in it early on, the fewer costly and dangerous crises we face later. If we don’t, we’ll have to rely on riskier and costlier tools to defend our national security interests, such as economic coercion or military intervention.
Because it’s less visible, diplomacy is often underrated and overlooked. It’s hard to take credit for the crises we avoid. But American diplomacy — backed up by our military might — is what kept us out of a hot war with the Soviet Union, has prevented war between China and Taiwan, and ended conflict between Egypt and Israel, to name a few. I’ve seen diplomacy mitigate conflict in places such as Kenya, Burundi and Somalia.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-the-first-thing-we-do-is-lets-lay-off-the-diplomats/