If I remember right Obama nominated an ambassador to Norway who didn't speak Norwegian. Up until the civil war they actually handed out military commands this same way and it took hundreds of thousands of deaths for them to finally realize how terrible an idea that was.https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/1179968125418143744 …
They did it for similar reasons. If you could pay to outfit a regiment, you could have command of a regiment. If you can pay to do all the frilly social stuff that ambassadors are expected to do, it keeps a lot of frilly social stuff off the public dime. There’s value in that
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There's no real need for career FSOs to be ambassadors to friendly, stable, well functioning democracies. But the tradeoff is that the donors who seek out those ambassador jobs end up being mildly corrupt. (I am a wet blanket on "mild corruption" though)
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Obviously Ukraine is not a friendly, stable, well functioning democracy either, it's one of the places you would want career people with local expertise.
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