Successful diplomats are duplicitous by craft, and, often by nature: They move, stealthily, beneath statesmen’s public phrases and grand pretensions, to negotiate with foreign powers in an endless “swirl of lusting, murderous, satanic desire,” as the late Charles Hill, a former diplomat and speechwriter for Henry Kissinger, put it in his book "Grand Strategies." They serve their superiors reliably yet sometimes secretly, occasionally contravening their superiors' domestic interests by distorting what they tell them about bargains being struck with adversaries to hold off blood-dimmed tides.
Donald Trump has just offered America's U.N. ambassadorship to a noisy sycophant whose cut-and-thrust tactics toward Americans citizens on college campuses have been on display since 2023, as I noted in January in a long essay for Salon about the origins of American preoccupations with Israel/Palestine. As chair of the House of Representatives’ Republican conference, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York appointed herself an official alarmist about antisemitism by spearheading a Dec. 5, 2023, committee hearing on what she called “the rot of antisemitism” in student protests against the war in Gaza.
