The Trump administration in recent days has ordered more than two dozen career diplomats serving across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America back to Washington

International News via Reuters:

Democratic senators urged President Donald Trump on Wednesday to reverse a recall of nearly 30 career ambassadors, warning the move leaves a dangerous leadership vacuum that allows adversaries like Russia and China to expand their reach.

The Trump administration in recent days has ordered more than two dozen career diplomats serving across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America back to Washington to ensure U.S. missions abroad reflect its “America First” priorities.

Calling the abrupt mass recalls an “unprecedented move” that no other administration has done since Congress established the modern Foreign Service a century ago, 10 Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said there was no plan to replace them with qualified candidates.

The removals bring the number of empty U.S. ambassadorial posts to well over 100, about half of all such posts worldwide, the senators said in their letter addressed to Trump and seen by Reuters. The senators said 80 posts had been vacant before the decision.

State Department and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the letter. A senior department official on Monday described the mass recall as “a standard process in any administration.”

“As the over 100 U.S. embassies lacking senior leadership await a new U.S. ambassador, China, Russia and others will maintain regular communications with the foreign leaders that we will have effectively abandoned, allowing our adversaries to expand their reach and influence to limit, and even harm, U.S. interests,” Democrats said in their letter.

The senators, who included Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Jeanne Shaheen, Chris Murphy and others, provided examples of how Washington would lack top-level U.S. presence in crucial locations as Beijing and Moscow make inroads.

In regions from the Indo-Pacific to Africa and the Balkans as well as Latin America, Washington would be on the back foot countering China’s expanding economic reach, the senators said.

“These ambassadors have demonstrated their commitment to faithfully execute the policies of administrations of both parties for decades,” the senators said. “We urge you to reverse this decision immediately before more damage is done to America’s standing in the world.”

Political appointees leave their posts when a new administration takes office but career diplomats, while serving at the pleasure of the president, are often considered bipartisan and typically serve three to four years in their overseas posts regardless of a change in government.

But Trump has long been suspicious of the bureaucracy and has repeatedly pledged to “clean out the deep state” by firing bureaucrats whom he deems disloyal and placing loyalists in senior roles.

In February, Trump ordered Secretary of State Marco Rubio to revamp the U.S. foreign service to ensure that the Republican president’s foreign policy is “faithfully” implemented.

In July, the Trump administration fired more than 1,300 State Department diplomats and civil servants as Washington grappled with multiple crises on the world stage: Russia’s war in Ukraine, the almost two-year-long Gaza conflict, and the Middle East on edge due to high tension between Israel and Iran.

The Department’s total workforce reduction in the U.S. totaled roughly 3,000 after deferred resignations and early retirements, accounting for more than 11% of its total foreign and civil service officers.

Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Lisa Shumaker

Washington imposed visa bans on Tuesday on five European citizens, including French former EU commissioner Thierry Breton

International News via Reuters:

The European Union, France and Germany condemned U.S. visa bans on five Europeans combating online hate and disinformation on Wednesday, after President Donald Trump’s administration took its latest swipe at long-standing allies across the Atlantic.

Washington imposed visa bans on Tuesday on five European citizens, including French former EU commissioner Thierry Breton. It accuses them of working to censor freedom of speech or unfairly target U.S. tech giants with burdensome regulation.

The bans mark a fresh escalation against Europe, a region Washington argues is fast becoming irrelevant due to its weak defences, inability to tackle immigration, needless red tape and “censorship” of far-right and nationalist voices to keep them from power.

EUROPEANS FORCED TO RETHINK TRANSATLANTIC TIES

They come just weeks after a U.S. National Security Strategy document warned Europe faced “civilizational erasure” and must course-correct if it is to remain a reliable U.S. ally.

That document – and other comments by senior Trump officials, including a bombshell February speech by Vice President JD Vance in Munich – have upended postwar assumptions about Europe’s close relationship with its strongest ally, and concentrated minds across European capitals on the urgent need to diversify away from reliance on U.S. technology and defence.

In Brussels, Paris and Berlin, senior officials condemned the U.S. bans, and defended Europe’s right to legislate on how foreign companies operate locally.

A European Commission spokesperson said it “strongly condemns the U.S. decision”, adding: “Freedom of expression is a fundamental right in Europe and a shared core value with the United States across the democratic world.”

The spokesperson said the EU would seek answers from Washington, but said it could “respond swiftly and decisively” against the “unjustified measures”.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been travelling across France to warn about the dangers that disinformation poses to democracy, said he had spoken with Breton and thanked him for his work.

“We will not give up, and we will protect Europe’s independence and the freedom of Europeans,” Macron said on X.

DSA ANGERS DC

Breton, a former French finance minister and the European commissioner for the internal market from 2019 to 2024, was one of the architects of the EU’s Digital Services Act.

A landmark piece of legislation, the DSA aims to make the internet safer by compelling tech giants to do more to tackle illegal content, including hate speech and child sexual abuse material.

But the DSA has riled the Trump administration, which accuses the EU of placing “undue” restrictions on freedom of expression in its efforts to combat hateful speech, misinformation and disinformation. It also argues that the DSA unfairly targets U.S. tech giants and U.S. citizens.

Trump officials were particularly upset earlier this month when Brussels’ sanctioned Elon Musk’s X platform, fining it 120 million euros for breaching online content rules. Musk and Breton have often sparred online over EU tech regulation, with Musk referring to him as the “tyrant of Europe”.

Breton, the most high-profile individual targeted, wrote on X: “Is McCarthy’s witch hunt back?”

GERMANY SAYS BANS ON ACTIVISTS ‘UNACCEPTABLE’

The bans also targeted Imran Ahmed, the British CEO of the U.S.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate; Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of the German non-profit HateAid; and Clare Melford, co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index, according to U.S. Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers.

Germany’s justice ministry said the two German activists had the government’s “support and solidarity” and the visa bans on them were unacceptable, adding that HateAid supported people affected by unlawful digital hate speech.

“Anyone who describes this as censorship is misrepresenting our constitutional system,” it said in a statement. “The rules by which we want to live in the digital space in Germany and in Europe are not decided in Washington.”

Britain said it was committed to upholding the right to free speech.

“While every country has the right to set its own visa rules, we support the laws and institutions which are working to keep the internet free from the most harmful content,” a British government spokesperson said in a statement.

A Global Disinformation Index spokesperson called the visa bans “an authoritarian attack on free speech and an egregious act of government censorship.”

“The Trump Administration is, once again, using the full weight of the federal government to intimidate, censor, and silence voices they disagree with,” they said. “Their actions today are immoral, unlawful, and un-American.”

Breton is not the first French person to be sanctioned by the Trump administration.

In August, Washington sanctioned French judge Nicolas Yann Guillou, who sits on the International Criminal Court, for the tribunal’s targeting of Israeli leaders and a past decision to investigate U.S. officials.

Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta, Gabriel Stargardter, Sarah Marsh and Sam Tabahriti; Editing by Michael Perry and Alex Richardson