The American Embassy: Neglected Asset

As the U.S. navigates a fast-moving and dangerous foreign policy landscape, one of our most important tools remains oddly misunderstood: the American embassy. In Washington, we spend endless hours arguing about policy—strategies, priorities, frameworks, doctrines. But we spend almost no time examining the means of executing that policy. And the primary means, the place where U.S. strategy becomes real, is the embassy. Because many in the U.S. government still picture an embassy as a small diplomatic office, this tool is undervalued, underused, and often
ignored.

In most countries, an embassy is no longer just a diplomatic outpost—it’s an entire U.S. government platform. The “country team” includes diplomats, military personnel, intelligence officers, law-enforcement attachés, development experts, and commercial officers. These teams run everything from foreign military training to cybercrime cooperation to counter-narcotics work to U.S. business support. When they function as a unified unit, the U.S. has far more influence in-country than Washington realizes.

At the center of this machine is one person: the ambassador. Every agency has its own mandates and culture, but the ambassador is the conductor of this orchestra. Integrating these moving parts into one coherent plan is not simple work. It demands judgment, management skill, and the ability to coordinate strong personalities from across the government. This is not something someone learns by osmosis. It requires serious, shared preparation—which we mostly don’t provide. In the private sector, successful organizations invest heavily in leadership and integration training because they understand that execution fails without it; the U.S. government ignore that same logic to its embassies.

Inside a modern embassy you’ll find:

• Military representatives coordinating training, defense ties, foreign military sales, and intelligence exchanges.
• Intelligence officers providing threat insight and early warning.
• DEA agents working trafficking cases with local police.
• FBI legal attachés tackling cybercrime, terrorism, and major criminal investigations.
• Commerce officers helping U.S. firms enter markets and resolve disputes.
• Consular officers protecting Americans in distress.
• And diplomats, still doing the in-person work no secure video can replace.

This brings up a common Washington argument: Why do we need people on the ground at all? Can’t we handle most of this remotely? The reality is that Washington can transmit information, but embassies provide context—the difference between a clever plan and a workable one. Crises hinge on local relationships and a feel for political dynamics. Law enforcement, intelligence, military cooperation, commercial work, and crisis response all depend on physical presence. And a staffed, capable embassy sends a message of commitment that endless video calls never will.

If embassies are where policy becomes action, then embassy leadership and training should be central to foreign policy. Instead, they tend to be an afterthought. The State Department has been slow to adapt to the modern interagency nature of embassies. Resistance to joint training and
cross-agency integration has weakened State’s ability to manage today’s posts. And Congress, for decades, has shown a broad indifference to how the Department functions—rarely digging into how embassies actually operate or what they need to do their job well.

Fixing this requires putting as much thought into execution as we put into policy.

First, ambassadors and country-team leaders need shared, advanced training.
Leaders from State, Defense, USAID, FBI, DEA, DHS, Commerce, and others should train together before taking up a post. Joint crisis scenarios should force them to integrate their tools and practice running an embassy as a single team—with the ambassador clearly in charge. The Diplomatic Studies Foundation has run training seminars to do exactly this.

Second, each embassy needs recurring exercises.
Posts should regularly test their country strategy by combining diplomatic, security, intelligence, law-enforcement, and economic tools. After-action notes should feed back into the Foreign Service Institute so the entire system learns.

Third, we need real cross-agency development. Six- to twelve-month exchanges among agencies should be routine, and promotions should reward effective country-team leadership—not siloed expertise.

All of this requires serious reform, not the lip service we have seen by both political parties. Agencies should jointly charter the Foreign Service Institute to set interagency training standards and oversee readiness. Congress should fund integrated embassy training and modernize FSI’s authorities to make a difference.
Washington will always debate policy. But unless we invest in the people and platforms that execute that policy—the embassies—those are shallow debates.