Last year, just before Halloween, Lewis Lukens, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in London, visited a pair of English universities where he spoke about the importance of international cooperation, beseeching students not to “swipe left” on the historic “special relationship” between the U.K. and America. The speeches were—according to a copy of the remarks that Lukens provided to GQ—fairly anodyne, reprising all the things Americans and Brits had learned from each other, all the ways we’ve helped each other over the years, disagreements notwithstanding. At the time, things between the two countries had been strained—in part because President Trump had attacked British leaders, including Prime Minister Theresa May and London Mayor Sadiq Khan—but Lukens, the second-most-senior American diplomat to the United Kingdom, had a request for the students who had gathered to see him: “Don’t write off the special relationship.”

A week later, Lukens says, his boss, the U.S. ambassador Woody Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune and a Trump political appointee, told him that he was done, firing Lukens from his post seven months ahead of when he was scheduled to leave for a new assignment. After nearly 30 years as a foreign service officer, his State Department career was over. The reason? Lukens says he had unwittingly committed a fatal error in his speech: He had mentioned former president Barack Obama.

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To open the speech, Lukens, who had worked for presidents of both parties, used an anecdote from his time as ambassador to Senegal to illustrate how allies can handle disagreements. He mentioned Obama’s 2013 visit to the country. “There was incredible excitement,” Lukens said in his speech. “He had a guard of honor, crowds shouting his name, street vendors selling WE LOVE OBAMA T-shirts. It was really amazing. And the president had really great talks with the Senegalese president, Macky Sall. They got on really well. But what I remember most of all was the disagreement they had—as friends.” Lukens explained that during the trip, an American journalist had asked Obama whether he had pressed the Senegalese leader on LGBT rights—a provocative topic in a country where same-sex relationships are criminalized as “unnatural” and where the LGBT community faces widespread discrimination. Lukens told the students that Obama handled the thorny question well. And then he moved on to the rest of the speech, not realizing the damage he’d done with a single anecdote. (When asked about the episode and Lukens’s ouster, the State Department declined to comment. The American embassy in London did not respond to a request for comment.)

This incident, which has not been previously reported, offers a stark example of the politicization of the foreign service under Trump. It’s also a grim illustration of how the administration—through three years of attempted budget cuts, hiring freezes, and grotesquely personal attacks—has eviscerated the country's diplomatic corps and put highly sensitive matters of national security in the hands of politically appointed novices. They are people like Gordon Sondland, the Trump donor who became America's ambassador to the European Union, who is now playing a starring role in the Ukrainian imbroglio that imperils the Trump presidency. It is no accident that impeachment hangs on a matter of diplomacy—and a stand-off between the country's top foreign policy professionals and the president's political allies, national security amateurs installed to do Trump’s bidding rather than the country’s.

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It’s not uncommon that a new president will come to office wary of the State Department, a large bureaucracy that does not owe the president any special loyalty. Historically, Republican presidents have been even more suspicious of the worldly polyglots at Foggy Bottom. But no president has been as nakedly hostile to America’s diplomats as Donald Trump, who ran on an anti-elitist, anti-”globalist” platform and saw the intelligence community’s report on Russian election interference as a “deep state” conspiracy against him. And the foreign service is nothing if not a group of elite, globalist bureaucrats—especially in the view of Trump and his allies.

When Rex Tillerson became secretary of state in early 2017, he immediately got to work shaping the president’s distrust into reality. He set about slashing the ranks of the State Department, both through attrition and through proposed budget cuts. The first few months of Tillerson’s tenure was marked by an across-the-board hiring freeze and an exodus of senior, high-profile foreign service officers, people like Victoria Nuland, who had been the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, and Daniel Fried, who designed America’s sanctions on Russia. Much of this—as in the case of Nuland and Fried—stemmed from political disagreement and the officers' not wanting to serve Donald Trump. Other senior foreign service officers, though, had no intention of leaving and were pushed out by the use of State Department regulations.

For instance, Senate-confirmed ambassadors returning from abroad have 90 days to find a new State Department assignment. If they do not receive another posting, they’re required to retire. During Tillerson’s tenure, returning career foreign ambassadors were offered a choice: take a menial post reviewing Freedom of Information Act requests, or face retirement. "Several of our members who were finishing their assignments as ambassadors overseas were told that the only job available when they came back was reviewing documents for declassification,” says Eric Rubin, a senior foreign service officer and president of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA). “If they refused that assignment, they would have to retire under a rule that says returning ambassadors have only 90 days to be reassigned or they have to retire."

In practice, two foreign service officers told me, that job meant reviewing Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. “Thanks to Judicial Watch, that’s what most of the FOIA requests were,” one of the officers said, referring to a conservative activist group that has spent the past few years propagating various Hillary Clinton conspiracy theories.

When Tillerson was fired by tweet and his successor, Mike Pompeo, vowed to bring the “swagger” back to the State Department, he reversed many of Tillerson’s slash-and-burn policies. Still, foreign service veterans say, the damage was done.

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What’s more, the attrition continues unabated. Career foreign service officers work long hours in difficult conditions, making less money than they would in the private sector. Often, they are driven by their sense of mission—say, promoting American values abroad—but when President Trump began attacking the pillars of American national security and smearing diplomats by name on Twitter, “suddenly,” says one senior foreign service officer who was pushed out on a scheduling technicality, “the equation didn’t make sense anymore.” What had started as a trickle of people leaving at the highest levels—often, people who were close to retirement—has turned into a flood of mid-career and junior officers heading for the door. The departure of top talent, people who had decades’ worth of wisdom that could have passed on to people below them, as well as the exodus of mid-level officers who had years to go before their retirements, will continue to resonate for quite a while, says Nicholas Burns, a retired career foreign service officer who is now at the Harvard Kennedy School. “That gap will show up years later,” he told me.

“What’s striking is both the decapitation of the State Department and the loss of people who should have been the next leadership of the department,” says the foreign service officer who was forced out. “It’s a hollowing out of the foreign service. You can’t replace those mid-level people easily at the numbers at which they’re losing them. That will take a generation to rebuild.”

Previously unpublished data from the AFSA shows that the foreign service is losing people at an alarming clip. In the first two years of Trump’s presidency, nearly half of the State Department’s Career Ministers retired or were pushed out. Another 20 percent of its Minister Counselors, one rank level down, also left.

There are no official numbers yet for 2019, but one former career foreign service officer I spoke with offered a telling piece of data that speaks to the unease. Last December, this ex–foreign service officer created a Facebook group aimed at connecting fellow FSOs looking to transition out of the service and into the private sector. In less than a year, this former FSO told me, the group has accumulated over 1,000 members. In the two months since the impeachment inquiry began and Trump started smearing career FSOs like Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and Jennifer Williams, more foreign service officers have begun looking for an exit. Another 100 FSOs have requested to join the Facebook group since the impeachment proceedings began, the source told me, asking other group members to help them dust off their résumés or meet them for informational interviews.

“We’re worried about the effect this can have on recruitment, where people say, ‘Is this what could happen to me?’ ” says Rubin. “People think, ‘I could be subpoenaed, I could be ruined with legal bills, I could end up vilified on TV when all I did was my job.’ ”

This comes on top of American diplomats feeling like the Trump administration has been even more focused on controlling foreign policy than past administrations, pushing foreign service professionals to the side using a variety of methods. “The administration’s strategy is to isolate career people from the policymaking process as much as possible, and where that’s not possible, to stifle dissent through character assassination and to let that have a chilling effect,” says the foreign service officer who was forced out, adding, “God, it makes me want to vomit. Because what country are we talking about?”

In fact, recruitment has already fallen off dramatically. Ten years ago, in 2009, about 21,000 people took the test to join the American foreign service. Today, according to AFSA’s analysis of internal State Department data, that number is just over 9,000—less than half. And that was before the impeachment inquiry began.

All of this has created alarming gaps all over the world. Trump was slow to fill diplomatic appointments, and with time a clear preference has emerged for “acting” secretaries and ambassadors who are accountable not to the Senate but to him. According to AFSA, 20 ambassadorships remain unfilled. One-third of foreign service jobs in overseas U.S. embassies and consulates sit empty. The work of filling those jobs has ground to a halt because of impeachment proceedings.

There’s a hope that, if Trump doesn’t win re-election, many of the departed foreign service officers will return to the State Department. Elizabeth Warren’s plan for restructuring the State Department includes a provision to lure back diplomats who have left or were pushed out during the Trump years. “The practical reality is it’s hard to bring people back,” says a senior foreign service officer. “There’s a reason they left; they’ve rebuilt their lives. Some proposals, including Warren’s, are not realistic.”

Meanwhile, China continues staffing up across the world, including in Africa, where the U.S. has an especially high number of unfilled jobs. According to Australia’s Lowy Institute, which issues an annual Diplomacy Index, China just surpassed the United States in diplomatic muscle. The United States, which for decades after World War II had the highest number of embassies and consulates, has been outpaced by a rising adversary.

One foreign service officer described a politically appointed ambassador inquiring about the difference between the NSA and CIA.

American diplomatic strength, foreign service veterans say, is further undercut by the high number of political appointees Trump has named to ambassadorships. While many political appointees are quick studies and do a good job of representing American interests abroad—career FSOs point to Kay Bailey Hutchison, Trump’s ambassador to NATO, as an example of excellence—many others are woefully unprepared for the job. Unlike career foreign service officers who are often experts in the country in which they are stationed, political nominees are usually top campaign donors and lack the knowledge of either the country to which they’re posted or the diplomatic protocols on which host countries insist. One foreign service officer described a politically appointed ambassador inquiring about the difference between the NSA and CIA.

And yet Trump has appointed more political allies to ambassadorships than any other postwar president. According to AFSA, 52 percent of America’s ambassadors are political appointees. This is the highest proportion since AFSA started keeping count in 1960. The last time the number of politically appointed ambassadors was this high was Ronald Reagan’s second term, when the proportion of political ambassadors peaked at 37 percent. “We are concerned that the percentage of political appointees is the highest it’s ever been,” says Rubin, the AFSA president. “This really hurts us overseas to carry out the president’s policy and to defend national security interests.”

“We are very often outmatched and outgunned and frequently outmaneuvered these days.”

After all, these political appointees, who are often diplomatic novices, are usually facing off against highly trained, disciplined, professional diplomats from countries like Russia and China, which don’t have any politically appointed ambassadors. “China has only professional, not political appointees, and our ambassadors are not always taken seriously,” says one current foreign service official. “We are very often outmatched and outgunned and frequently outmaneuvered these days.”

The political appointees are also usually President Trump’s ideological allies, who see the deep state everywhere. Before Ambassador Johnson called Lukens in and fired him, Lukens told me that embassy staffers had heard the ambassador tossing the term “deep state” around, questioning the patriotism of employees he didn’t feel were sufficiently loyal to the president. Lukens was already suspect because, in June 2017, when he was the acting ambassador (Trump still hadn’t named anyone for the job), a terror attack hit London: A man with a knife and a truck mowed down pedestrians on London Bridge, killing eight and injuring 48 more. Trump immediately lashed out at Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor, and Lukens used the U.S. Embassy Twitter account to send a message of support to Londoners and their mayor in fairly mild diplomatic language. “I commend the strong leadership of the @MayorofLondon as he leads the city forward after this heinous attack,” Lukens wrote. Breitbart immediately spotted the tweet, and Lukens says he was subjected to several days of virtual abuse.

“There’s a higher level of mistrust from political ambassadors of career FSOs than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Lukens told me. “Many of Trump’s political ambassadors have an unfounded belief that government bureaucrats are overwhelmingly Democrats and liberals and working against Trump’s agenda, and that’s just not the case.”

It didn’t help that, when Trump attacked then prime minister Theresa May, Lukens also passed along a message to the White House from the highest levels of the British government. “The message was, ‘Can you guys cut it out?’ ” Lukens recalls. “The response from Washington was that, short of taking the president's phone away, we don’t really have anything we can do.”

More and more, American diplomats abroad find themselves cleaning up the fallout from the president’s tweets or off-the-cuff remarks. When Trump said he didn’t want any immigrants from “shithole countries,” several ambassadors in Africa were called in by their host countries’ foreign ministries and asked for an official explanation.

“We’re punching below our weight and not taken seriously,” says a senior foreign service officer. “We’re getting into squabbles with the host country, which is one thing if it’s Russia and China. It’s another if it’s our allies.”

After his dismissal, Lukens was eventually able to find work in the private sector and decided to stay in the U.K. But the incident was incredibly traumatic, he says. “I was really upset,” he told me recently on the phone from London. “It was a really difficult time.”

Then Lukens suffered another loss: The day after he left the London embassy for the last time, his father, Alan Wood Lukens, died. The senior Lukens was a World War II veteran—he had fought at D Day and the Rhine Valley. His unit helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp. When he returned home, he decided to continue his service abroad and joined the foreign service, where he served for 35 years. Lewis had grown up mostly in Africa, where his father served in various high-level posts. “So that’s what I thought I would do,” Lukens told me. “Dad got me into the foreign service.”

Yet his father’s last impressions of the foreign service under this president were confusing ones. “He didn’t understand President Trump, didn’t understand that version of America First,” Lukens says. “We’re all America first; we’ve all worked and fought for America. But America first doesn’t mean America alone. President Trump seems determined to make it alone by alienating our allies. I think my dad had a really hard time with that.”

Julia Ioffe is a GQ correspondent.