Johnson was a career member of the Senior Foreign Service and is president of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. This article is written in her personal capacity, not as a representative of ADST.
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
The history of the Department of State, one of the first Cabinet departments established, is intimately linked to our nation’s history and reflects the importance attached to managing our relations with foreign governments. Created in 1879, it is the bureaucratic home for two distinct cadres of nonpartisan career employees, under two congressionally mandated systems — the Foreign Service (FS) Schedule and the Civil Service (GS) General Schedule.
Foreign Service officers receive presidential commissions, and both cadres take an oath to uphold the Constitution. As career public servants, both are loyal to the presidency. Strengthening these career services rather than weakening them is critical in today’s complex, interdependent world, where managing relations and containing conflict are more important than ever.
Chas Freeman, one of our most articulate practitioners and writers on the art of diplomacy, explained the importance of a professional, nonpartisan diplomatic service:
“Diplomacy contributes to national well-being by exploiting unforeseen opportunities to advance state interests or reducing wasteful defense spending through détente, arms control, or disarmament accords. A great deal of diplomacy consists of ensuring that the natural frictions inherent in relations between states and peoples are minimized and restrained, that needless confrontations and blunders into warfare are avoided, and that when war does occur, its scope and level of violence are appropriately contained. … Diplomatic dialogue is the key to the fashioning of strategic relationships and the management of conflicting interests with foreign governments.”
Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, provides its own vision of American diplomacy and management. The chapter on the State Department — written by Kiron Skinner, who served as director of the Office of Policy Planning and as senior policy adviser to the secretary of state under Donald Trump — needs to be read in the context of the entire report. It rests on two main ideas: 1) the need for many more political appointees (vetted by Heritage for ideological conformity), and 2) the need to restructure and streamline the department to implement the president’s foreign policy agenda/vision.
In 1924, the Rogers Act established the United States Foreign Service as a professional, nonpartisan career cadre and the institutional backbone of the U.S. diplomatic service. Congress updated the legislation in 1946 and again with the 1980 Foreign Service Act, stipulating that “a career Foreign Service characterized by excellence and professionalism is essential to the national interest and must be preserved, strengthened, and improved to carry out its mission effectively in response to complex challenges of modern diplomacy and international relations.” Are not these challenges even more complex today?
The first part of the chapter in Project 2025 focuses on the need to ensure loyalty to the president’s agenda by installing appointees with established partisan credentials. The second part addresses the president’s foreign policy priorities. The third part covers reorganization strategy, consolidating foreign assistance and making public diplomacy “serve American interests.” I will focus on the first and third parts and then briefly comment on the foreign policy agenda.
Skinner highlights “one significant problem that the next President must address to be successful,” namely, a “tug-of-war between Presidents and bureaucracies,” asserting that “resistance is much starker under conservative Presidents” because “large swaths of the State Department workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President’s policy agenda.” No supporting examples are given. This statement misdiagnoses the reasons for the perceived “tug-of-war.” For career professionals, personal political leanings are not relevant to diplomatic practice or implementing foreign policy. Their job is to provide advice based on professional knowledge and experience and to implement whatever policy decision the political leaders make. Nonpartisan loyalty to the administration is the rule. Internal dissent or resignation over policy disagreement is rare.
In the subsection “History and Context,” Skinner states, “A major, if not the major, source of the State Department’s ineffectiveness lies in its institutional belief that it is an independent institution that knows what is best for the United States, sets its own foreign policy, and does not need direction from an elected President.” This may well be a perception in some quarters but does not accurately characterize the State Department I experienced.
The subsection “Political Leadership” proposes significantly expanding the number of political appointees and installing them without waiting for confirmation. This proposal harks back to the pre-1883 Pendleton Act era, doubling down on partisan patronage rather than on increased professionalism and expertise in service to elected leadership and presidential foreign policy.
The section “Shaping the Future” opens with the proposition that before developing a foreign policy “grand strategy” one must address structural reform and streamlining. It cites an earlier commission’s observation about the “ineffectual organizational structure in which regional and functional policies do not serve integrated goals” but doesn’t mention any of the subsequent reports and reform initiatives. Calls for restructuring have been made repeatedly over the decades since the report issued by that 1998 Hart-Rudman Commission on 21st Century National Security.
A better approach is a high-level bipartisan commission to examine institutional reforms that would best serve the demands of diplomacy today. Such a commission should include current and former members of the foreign and civil services, members of Congress, academics, and eminent personalities with understanding of foreign policy and diplomatic practice.
Finally, the section on the president’s foreign policy agenda posits “a world on fire” requiring heightened attention to several nations. Some pose “existential threats” to U.S. national security, others to “our economy”, and some “wild cards” are identified as China, Iran, Venezuela, Russia and North Korea. The overall mindset conveyed by this section –– “either you are with us or against us” — seems to be the underlying principle. Better would be George Shultz’s call to work for broad consensus on national security, framed by shared values. Shultz lamented the loss of nonpartisanship in our foreign policy and emphasized the dominant role that “earned trust” plays in determining cooperation or conflict in relations between and among nations. The most important first step would be to heed his call.
More articles about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- The Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.