Of all the things that are being broken in Washington, the State Department is the entity that will take the longest to fix. Every time we lose a midlevel diplomat, we’re also losing the personal relationships the diplomat has developed with their counterparts abroad. That’s what non-political DC folks have told me over the past few years. And that’s what Julia Ioffe reports in GQ. Trump Is Waging War on America’s Diplomats: how the president is politicizing our embassies, alienating our allies, and decimating the ranks of the foreign service. “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. 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.”

+ Meanwhile, our foreign diplomacy is currently being handled by President Trump who is at the NATO summit, where he clashed with allies (Macron), praised tyrants (Kim), attacked American opponents (Schiff), and served up a series of misleading statements (on topics ranging from NATO spending to the country of origin of most ISIS members). In other words, about what we (and our allies) have come to expect. Here’s the latest from CNN.