Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.
Flashy international summits and armed conflicts make the headlines, but most foreign policy is conducted at the staff level and flies way under the public’s radar. Traditionally, it has been far less partisan than domestic politics, and career experts with deep knowledge of the issues and regions they manage have performed the lion’s share of work in this area under presidents of both parties.
When Donald Trump won the Electoral College, it was widely assumed that there would be changes to America’s more high-profile, public-facing foreign relations, but the anonymous experts who handle the routine tasks of navigating a super-power on the world stage would continue to perform their duties largely unmolested.
Wow, was that assumption wrong.