“After four years of relentless attacks by the Trump administration and decades of neglect, political paralysis, and organizational drift, U.S. diplomacy is badly broken,” William J. Burns and Linda Thomas-Greenfield write. Career diplomats have been systematically sidelined and excluded. Since 2017, nearly a quarter of the senior Foreign Service has left. Many more consider leaving. And the slow progress in making the diplomatic corps more diverse has halted or gone into reverse.

But the State Department “is not beyond repair, at least not yet,” Burns and Thomas-Greenfield write. “The aim should be not to restore the power and purpose of U.S. diplomacy as it once was but to reinvent it for a new era. Accomplishing that transformation demands a focused, disciplined reform effort—one that is rooted in the people who animate U.S. diplomacy.”

For more on the state of U.S. diplomacy, read Mike Pompeo on the Trump administration’s approach, William J. Burns on the damage Trump has done to U.S. credibility abroad, Bonnie Bley on China’s growing diplomatic network, and Brett McGurk on the disconnect between Trump’s policies and the vision articulated by his secretary of state.

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