by a new one, between Jared Kushner
and Mexico’s foreign secretary. “It’s all
pretty much just between them,” Feeley
told me. “There’s not really any inter-
agency relationships going on right now.”
When Tillerson was fired, this March,
eight of the ten most senior positions
at State were unfilled, leaving no one in
charge of arms control, human rights,
trade policy, or the environment. For
diplomats in the field, the consequences
were clearly evident. In 2017, Dave
Harden, a longtime Foreign Service
oicer, was assigned to provide relief to
victims of the war in Yemen, one of the
world’s worst humanitarian disasters.
The entire diplomatic staf for the coun-
try was barely a dozen people. “We
worked out of a three-bedroom house,”
he said. “It felt like a startup.” There was
no support from State, and no policy
direction, he said: “The whole system
was completely broken.” Harden re-
signed last month.
Before Feeley left oice, he told me,
“We don’t get instructions from the U.S.
government.” He recalled Trump’s an-
nouncement, in December, 2017, that
the U.S. would recognize Jerusalem as
the capital of Israel. As the United Na-
tions considered a resolution condemn-
ing the move, Nikki Haley, Trump’s
envoy to the U.N., circulated a threat-
ening letter, saying that Trump “has re-
quested I report back on those who
voted against us.” Feeley heard nothing
in advance about the letter. “Do you
think we got a heads-up, to prepare?”
he said. “Nothing.” Soon afterward, he
received outraged telephone calls from
Panama’s President and Vice-President,
Isabel de Saint Malo. Feeley recalled
that when Saint Malo called “she said,
‘John, friends don’t treat friends like this.’
All I could say was ‘I know. I’m sorry.’
We both knew it was going to hurt our
personal and institutional relationship.
And there was nothing we could do
about it.”
Under Barack Obama, the approach
to the region had focussed on reversing
a half century of antagonism toward
Cuba. For decades, oicials from other
countries habitually pointed to Amer-
ica’s insistence on isolating Cuba as an
emblem of post-colonial intransigence.
“We American dips would dutifully re-
spond with our legitimate points about
the human-rights abuses on the island,
the soul-crushing nature of a totalitar-
ian system,” Feeley said. But, he said,
the conversations were a “dialogue of
the deaf.” Once the Obama Adminis-
tration restored relations with Cuba,
U.S. diplomats found it much easier to
negotiate for commercial coöperation
and security measures.
Since Trump’s election, “we’ve taken
a step back in tone,” Feeley said. “We
tried to get Kerry to bury the Monroe
Doctrine. But now, all of a sudden, it’s
back.” At an Organization of Ameri-
can States event in 2013, Secretary of
State John Kerry had promised a room-
ful of oicials that the U.S. would end
its interventionism in Latin America.
Early this year, during an appearance
in Texas, Tillerson called the Monroe
Doctrine “clearly... a success.” The
rhetoric has had a chilling efect, Fee-
ley said, “Latins believe that Trump and
his senior oicials have no real inter-
est in the region, beyond baiting Mex-
ico and tightening the screws on Cuba
and Venezuela.” With Cuba, the Trump
Administration has revived the hostile
stance of the Cold War, reducing the
Embassy in Havana to a skeleton staf;
Cubans who want to apply for U.S. visas
must now travel to Guyana. With Ven-
ezuela, eforts to initiate dialogue havebeen replaced by White House oicials’
veiled calls for a military coup. “We have
all these ties that bind us—proximity,
commerce, shared Judeo-Christian val-
ues,” Feeley said. “But right now it feels
like a market adjustment gone south.”O
ne morning, I drove with Feeley’s
team across the Bridge of the
Americas, which spans the Panama
Canal. (The bridge, built by the U.S.
and opened in 1962, was initially named
in honor of Maurice H. Thatcher, a
former governor of the Canal Zone.)
On the far side was a building in the
style of a pagoda: a monument to Chi-
na’s presence in Panama. “Look how
prominent they’ve become,” one of the
stafers said. In June, 2016, a major ex-
pansion of the canal was completed,
and the first ship through was an enor-
mous Chinese freighter, designed to fit
the new dimensions. “I got a big Amer-
ican naval ship to park right outside
the locks, where the Chinese ship would
see it,” Feeley said. “And I threw our
annual Embassy July 4th party on it.”
He laughed at the memory, but he knew
that the gesture was ultimately futile.
As the United States has retreated
from Latin America, China’s influence
has grown. Since 2005, banks linked to“This calls for some spooky music.”