Biden Administration Makes Skin Color A Litmus Test For Being A U.S. Diplomat

The State Department has tossed merit out as a criterion for promotion within America’s diplomatic corps and replaced it with wokeness.

With a war in Ukraine and challenges to U.S. leadership around the world, there is no shortage of possibilities for skilled diplomats to pursue America’s interests abroad. So it is particularly disturbing that the Biden administration has just tossed merit out as a criteria for promotion within America’s diplomatic corps and replaced it with wokeness.

For decades, the State Department has chosen its diplomats through the Foreign Service Officer Test, a grueling gauntlet that begins with a challenging, objective, written exam. Now that is about to change in the name of wokeness and diversity bean-counting. The State Department has just announced that the assessment process will now judge the “whole candidate” instead, without requiring applicants to even pass the written exam. These “whole candidate” reviews have long been used to allow racial discrimination.


For ten years at the Hoover Institution, I worked closely with the late Secretary of State George Shultz, President Reagan’s foreign policy point man for the last six years of his administration. He told me many times about the importance that the professional staff played in accomplishing President Reagan’s foreign policy goals. While Shultz believed in a workforce that could govern over a diverse country, as the namesake for the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center, which is responsible for training our diplomats, he would be appalled that diversity has supplanted merit as a criteria for promotion within the diplomatic corps.

Why now? This is just the latest step taken by the racially obsessed Biden administration to ensure that the State Department is less “pale, male, and Yale” and more “diverse.” The diversity uber alles mantra of the woke State Department threatens America’s power and interests.

Diversity at Expense of Excellence

The first step in this process was the appointment of Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley as the State Department’s political commissar for diversity and inclusion. In this position, which reports directly to secretary of State, Abercrombie-Winstanley weighs in on everything from who gets high-profile assignments to how the department recruits new officers. With race, as opposed to excellence, the new mantra for the State Department, it is inevitable that we will choose ever-more-mediocre and incompetent diplomats who check the required diversity boxes.

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