Blinken says congressional raids help US rivals

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday called for faster confirmation of ambassadors by the Senate, saying long delays and dysfunction only benefited US competitors such as China.

With President Joe Biden’s four-year term almost over, the fate of dozens of ambassadors and other top national security positions remains pending in the Senate, largely due to political battles with the rival Republican Party.

“The system is broken,” Blinken said in a speech at the Foreign Service Institute, which trains U.S. diplomats, in a Washington suburb.

“It undermines our competitiveness. It discourages public service delivery,” he said.

“Of course, all this fuels our competitors’ false narratives about our decline and division. It reinforces their belief – their false belief – that now is the time to challenge the United States and pursue its revisionist goals,” he said.

Blinken said that under his leadership, the State Department has taken steps to reorganize to address Beijing’s growing global influence, including setting up an internal “China House” to guide U.S. policy.

It has also deployed resources in key areas of competition between the two powers, including emerging technologies and the South Pacific.

But Blinken said the confirmation process, in which the Senate approves presidential nominees, has set back efforts, citing figures that the average ambassador waits 240 days for approval, up from 50 days in 2001.

Biden also blamed Congress for budget uncertainty, including the feud over whether to reauthorize funding for the anti-HIV/AIDS initiative PEPFAR.

“We have to find a way to fix this system. We have to do better through our people. We have to do better through our diplomacy,” Blinken said.

At the end of Biden’s term, about 15 U.S. missions are completely lacking ambassadors, even as he has put forward nominees, according to the American Foreign Service Association’s running count.

Among them is Cambodia: Career diplomat Robert Forden has been in limbo since June 2022, with Republicans attacking him for failing to prevent US diplomats’ Covid tests while serving in the US embassy in Beijing during the pandemic.

Biden also has not put forward any new nominees after ambassadors stepped down from prominent positions in countries including Germany and Turkey.

The US ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, was nominated only six months into Biden’s term and then needed another six months for Senate confirmation.

The candidate to become ambassador to Libya, career diplomat Jennifer Gavito, recently said she was withdrawing because of the delay, which she said was ceding space in the long-unstable country to Russia and China.

sct/sst