The Diplomat Who Quit the Trump Administration

For John Feeley, the Ambassador to Panama, moral failings at home seemed to compound tactical failings abroad.
8220My values are not his values8221 John Feeley said of Trump. He quit this March.
“My values are not his values,” John Feeley said, of Trump. He quit this March.Illustration by Lincoln Agnew. Photographs by (from top to bottom): Arnulfo Franco / AP (head); DAJ / Getty (body); Mark Reinstein / Corbis / Getty (building); Helovi / Getty (beach)

John Feeley, the Ambassador to Panama and a former Marine helicopter pilot, is not averse to strong language, but he was nevertheless startled by his first encounter with President Donald Trump. Summoned to deliver a briefing in June, 2017, he was outside the Oval Office when he overheard Trump concluding a heated conversation, “Fuck him! Tell him to sue the government.” Feeley was escorted in, and saw that Mike Pence, John Kelly, and several other officials were in the room. As he took a seat, Trump asked, “So tell me—what do we get from Panama? What’s in it for us?” Feeley presented a litany of benefits: help with counter-narcotics work and migration control, commercial efforts linked to the Panama Canal, a close relationship with the current President, Juan Carlos Varela. When he finished, Trump chuckled and said, “Who knew?” He then turned the conversation to the Trump International Hotel and Tower, in Panama City. “How about the hotel?” he said. “We still have the tallest building on the skyline down there?”

Feeley had been a Foreign Service officer for twenty-seven years, and, like his peers, he advocates an ethos of nonpartisan service. Although he grew up as what he calls a “William F. Buckley Republican,” he has never joined a political party, and has voted for both Democrats and Republicans. When Trump was elected, he was surprised, but he resolved not to let it interfere with his work. His wife, Cherie, who also served for decades in diplomatic posts, said, “In the Foreign Service, we don’t have the luxury of gnashing our teeth at political outcomes. The hope is that person recognizes how delicate and complex it is to make foreign policy. It’s boring and it’s slow—but it’s how you make good products over time.” Still, Feeley was disheartened by his initial meeting with Trump. “In private, he is exactly like he is on TV, except that he doesn’t curse in public,” he told me. Feeley sensed that Trump saw every unknown person as a threat, and that his first instinct was to annihilate that threat. “He’s like a velociraptor,” he said. “He has to be boss, and if you don’t show him deference he kills you.”

Feeley is fifty-six years old and six feet one, with cropped silver hair and the exuberant demeanor of a Labrador retriever. In Panama, he established himself as both a forceful representative of American power and a minor Facebook celebrity. “He was definitely not an ordinary Ambassador,” Jorge Sánchez, a well-connected businessman, told me. “He had the charisma of someone out of social media.” An extroverted man who speaks fluent street Spanish (learned with help from Cherie, who is Puerto Rican), Feeley plays the cajón, dances salsa, loves bullfighting, and is pleased to tell you about his friendship with the late Gabriel García Márquez. He is also unmistakably American: a native New Yorker and a committed fan of football (the Giants), baseball (the Mets), poker, and jazz (Charlie Parker). A writer for La Estrella de Panamá, the country’s oldest newspaper, once noted, “Between anecdotes, he likes a drink of whiskey.” In conversation, Feeley expresses himself with a hand-over-heart earnestness that is rare among diplomats, who tend toward moral relativism. “He really believes in all that stuff like duty and honor,” a friend of his told me. “He’s a total Boy Scout.”

Last December, half a year after the meeting in the Oval Office, Feeley submitted a letter of resignation. Many diplomats have been dismayed by the Trump Administration; since the Inauguration, sixty per cent of the State Department’s highest-ranking diplomats have left. But Feeley broke with his peers by publicly declaring his reasons. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, titled “Why I Could No Longer Serve This President,” he said that Trump had “warped and betrayed” what he regarded as “the traditional core values of the United States.” For months, Feeley had tried to maintain the country’s image, as Trump’s policies and pronouncements offended allies: the ban on travellers from Muslim-majority countries; the call for a wall on the Mexican border; the political bait and switch concerning the Dreamers; the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. As a result, Feeley wrote, “America is undoubtedly less welcome in the world today.” Increasingly, he feared that the country was embracing an attitude that was profoundly inimical to diplomacy: the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must. “If we do that,” he told me, “my experience and my world view is that we will become weaker and less prosperous.” It was not only Trump’s policies that troubled him. In the Post, he wrote, “My values were not his values.”

“You either get your politics from your family or you reject its politics,” Feeley told me. “I inherited mine.” Feeley was born in the Bronx and grew up in suburban New Jersey. His grandparents were of Italian descent on his mother’s side, Irish on his father’s. “They were New York City middle class—fiscal-responsibility types, strong-defense types—but also strongly believed that education was the vehicle for mobility.”

Feeley’s father worked for A. T. & T., but the men in his extended family were mostly cops and firefighters. His maternal grandfather, Frank Cosola, was a fireman and a former Navy sailor, who had earned a Silver Star in the Pacific during the Second World War. Although he hadn’t made it past high school, he was an incessant reader, as was his wife, Cookie, who volunteered as a Braille typist, transcribing books for Lighthouse for the Blind. They passed on their love of reading to Feeley’s mother, who later taught English at Fordham. The family watched William F. Buckley’s show “Firing Line” reverently. “It was his erudition that impressed my folks,” Feeley said. “That’s what they wanted for me.” His mother forced him into elocution classes, and his grandfather chided him not to speak like a “goombah.” Everyone pressed books on him. As a teen-ager, Feeley was accepted to Regis High School, an élite Jesuit academy on the Upper East Side.

He went on to Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where he met Cherie, who studied Russian history. But he soon diverted from scholastic life. In 1983, a recruiter for the Marines came to campus, and he signed up, without giving it much consideration. “I thought, Wow, that would be cool,” he recalled. “It was just a function of my kind of halftime-speech, be-all-you-can-be, get-your-ya-yas-out, young-man stuff.” After graduation, Feeley trained to fly helicopters, and for five years he was based at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, and served stints in Europe and on aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. “I had no combat flight hours,” he told me, laughing. “I had a very undistinguished military career.” Still, his ecumenical views impressed his peers. Tom Hoban, a former Marine buddy who is now a commercial pilot, said, “He was an exception to the rest of us knuckle draggers. But he was definitely one of the guys. And you knew he was going places.”

By the late eighties, the Feeleys were married, with two young sons, and they were feeling constrained by life on a military base. Cherie told me, “There were less than ten copies of the Sunday New York Times, and to get one you had to be there at 7 a.m.” They passed the Foreign Service exam, and were sent as a team to Latin America: first to the Dominican Republic, and then, in search of “action,” to Colombia, where Pablo Escobar had gone to war with the state.

In 2009, Feeley became deputy chief of mission in Mexico, where he found that his forthrightness could get him into trouble, and sometimes out of it. After secret cables released by WikiLeaks revealed that U.S. diplomats—including Feeley—had criticized the Mexican Army’s role in the drug war, President Felipe Calderón demanded that the Ambassador be removed. The U.S. acceded, but Feeley was allowed to remain. “He almost single-handedly righted the course,” Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican Ambassador to China, told me. “There were hard feelings in State about the U.S. having caved to Mexico’s government, and John was able to navigate both the U.S. and Mexican sides.” Feeley recalls that he kept quiet for a few months. Then, in a meeting with Calderón, he asked, “Am I radioactive, Mr. President? Because, if I am, I will make my preparations to leave.” Calderón said, “You aren’t toxic. But maybe stay away from the press, O.K.?” The tension subsided, and Feeley spent several years strengthening his network throughout Latin America. “In Mexico, John was U.S. foreign policy,” a U.S. diplomat in Latin America told me. “He was one of just a handful who could walk into any Presidential palace in the region and know someone there.”

At the end of January, before Feeley left his post in Panama, I went to visit him and Cherie at their residence, a nineteen-forties hilltop mansion that looked out over Panama City toward the Pacific Ocean. The rooms were cavernous and sparsely decorated. Oversized black-and-white photographs of Nina Simone and Etta James hung on the walls, left over from a jazz-themed party the Feeleys had thrown for the Fourth of July.

When I arrived, a camera crew was there, to film a video that was part of Feeley’s extended goodbye to Panama: a skit in which Feeley, declaring that he wanted to stay in the country, told Cherie that he intended to ask some local people for a job. After he marched out, Cherie adopted a telenovela-style despairing look, as if to say, “No one will ever hire him.”

Feeley is a showman, and early in his tenure he began filming himself encountering Panamanians outside the confines of rabiblanco society—a local term, meaning “white tail,” used to describe the traditionally Caucasian upper class. In one video, Feeley, in jeans and a black T-shirt, visited a tiny open-air barbershop, beneath a highway overpass in the gritty neighborhood of El Marañón. While a barber named Jesús trimmed his hair, Feeley said that he was planning to participate in the upcoming Carnaval celebrations. Jesús offered a mild response: “Even though nobody knows you around here, believe me, wherever you go you’ll be welcome.” Feeley’s staff posted the video on social media, and it went viral.

Panamanians are uniquely sensitive to the U.S. presence, and with good reason. The country was founded, in 1903, on territory split off from Colombia; the U.S., which had conspired in the secession plot, began building the canal the following year and for decades largely controlled the government. Things began to change in 1968, when the left-leaning general Omar Torrijos seized power and began pressing for Panama to gradually assume control of the canal. Twenty-one years later, though, the U.S. military invaded to oust Torrijos’s truculent successor, Manuel Noriega, and install a more pliant regime. In 1999, the canal was finally handed back, and since then the U.S. military bases that occupied the Canal Zone have been turned into malls, hotels, and housing developments. But the U.S. dollar remains Panama’s official currency, and baseball is the national sport. In many countries, American Ambassadors exert extraordinary influence—acting as interpreters of U.S. policy, resolving disputes, and, less publicly, leading intelligence teams. In Panama, they tend to be seen as agents of empire.

Cherie said that she and Feeley wanted to supplant the old model of U.S. diplomacy, which she described as “male, pale, and Yale.” Contemporary culture, she said, demanded “someone who can go out there on the street, talk in your language, dance with old ladies, drink wine.” After they arrived, in February, 2016, Feeley began showing up at street festivals and amateur boxing matches; he offered weekly English classes in El Chorrillo, an impoverished neighborhood that U.S. forces had bombed heavily in the fight against Noriega. With his public-affairs team, he developed videos to be shared on social media—intending, he said, to portray “Americans, even Ambassadors, as average people who like to drink, dance, party, help others.”

“This calls for some spooky music.”

Miroslava Herrera, the Afro-Panamanian singer of the well-known band Afrodisíaco, befriended Feeley. “He brought a different style,” she said. “One time, he trusted me to take him to a late-night folk event in a tough neighborhood. People were surprised but welcoming, and afterward he came to most of my band’s shows.” Herrera attended Feeley’s jazz-themed party, and recalled, “He had a Who’s Who of Panama there, all sharing a meal. And he made sure that the artist of the evening sang ‘Strange Fruit’ ”—Billie Holiday’s anti-lynching lament.

Foreign-affairs hawks sometimes describe this kind of historical reckoning as “apologizing for America.” But Feeley’s most controversial episodes in Panama came, instead, from asserting U.S. power too zealously. He told me, “I wanted to shatter the image of the U.S. Ambassador in Panama as proconsul—even while implementing policies that struck many as proconsul-ish.” Early in his posting, the U.S. Treasury Department accused a Panamanian business tycoon named Abdul Waked of laundering money for drug traffickers. Economic sanctions were directed at his assets, which included a string of duty-free shops, a department-store chain, and La Estrella de Panamá, the newspaper. Thousands of jobs were put at risk. Feeley, who described Waked as “one of the world’s most significant money launderers and criminal conspirators,” publicly supported the sanctions.

In the end, the case against Waked stalled. (A nephew, Nidal, confessed to a minor charge of bank fraud.) Feeley, who had promised to save jobs where he could, worked quietly to spare La Estrella, helping to arrange a deal in which Waked gave 50.1 per cent of his ownership share to a nonprofit. But several of Waked’s other businesses were auctioned off, and hundreds of employees lost their jobs. Mariela Sagel, a prominent columnist with La Estrella, wrote to me, “Feeley’s lightning passage through Panama was as devastating to the self-esteem of Panamanians as it was for the Waked businesses. After less than two years on the job he quit, claiming that he was not in agreement with Trump’s policies. If those were his reasons, why didn’t he resign when that demented man won the Presidency?”

Panamanians had their own experience with divisive populists. The country’s previous President, Ricardo Martinelli, was accused of spying on influential citizens and embezzling forty-five million dollars from a school-lunch program. (Martinelli denies these activities.) In 2015, he fled to Miami and asked the U.S. government for asylum, while Panama worked to extradite him. As Martinelli secured a mansion in Coral Gables and moved around with apparent freedom, many Panamanians began to suspect that the United States was protecting him. In May, 2017, I mentioned these suspicions to Feeley, but he assured me that the U.S. was pursuing the case. A few weeks later, Martinelli was arrested on a Justice Department warrant. “I pushed hard to have him arrested,” Feeley told me. “It sent a signal that impunity for grand-scale kleptocracy would not be tolerated and could be overcome by state-to-state judicial coöperation.” But, where Feeley saw coöperation, some in Panama saw another example of American overreach. An article in La Estrella said that critics of Feeley’s work on the case “could not remember an outsider’s interference of such magnitude.”

At a poker table in his library, Feeley spoke about the ways in which the Trump Administration’s policies were harming U.S. diplomacy. Between foreign posts, Feeley had held positions of increasing responsibility in the State Department, working as a deputy to Colin Powell and eventually becoming the second-ranking diplomat for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Co-workers jokingly referred to him as “the mayor.” He built teams, fostered a crew of loyalists (known as Feeley’s Mafia), and strove to be directly involved with policy implementation. “He was a superior bureaucrat—and I say that with love,” the U.S. diplomat in Latin America told me. “If you asked him his opinion he’d give it, and if you didn’t he’d give it. And that’s a really valuable thing in an organization like ours.” The diplomat added, “He was the one guy we all thought would be Assistant Secretary.”

Now the State Department was in tumult. As Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson had endorsed a thirty-one-per-cent budget cut and a hiring freeze on diplomats; in August, half a year into his term, seventy-one ambassadorships were unfilled, along with scores of other senior posts. Feeley was especially concerned about the frayed U.S. relationship with Mexico. When I spoke to him early in Trump’s term, the customary channels of communication had been replaced 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 interagency 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 officer, was assigned to provide relief to victims of the war in Yemen, one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. The entire diplomatic staff for the country 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 resigned last month.

Before Feeley left office, he told me, “We don’t get instructions from the U.S. government.” He recalled Trump’s announcement, in December, 2017, that the U.S. would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. As the United Nations considered a resolution condemning the move, Nikki Haley, Trump’s envoy to the U.N., circulated a threatening letter, saying that Trump “has requested 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, officials from other countries habitually pointed to America’s insistence on isolating Cuba as an emblem of post-colonial intransigence. “We American dips would dutifully respond with our legitimate points about the human-rights abuses on the island, the soul-crushing nature of a totalitarian system,” Feeley said. But, he said, the conversations were a “dialogue of the deaf.” Once the Obama Administration 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 American States event in 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry had promised a roomful of officials 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 effect, Feeley said, “Latins believe that Trump and his senior officials have no real interest in the region, beyond baiting Mexico 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 staff; Cubans who want to apply for U.S. visas must now travel to Guyana. With Venezuela, efforts to initiate dialogue have been replaced by White House officials’ veiled calls for a military coup. “We have all these ties that bind us—proximity, commerce, shared Judeo-Christian values,” Feeley said. “But right now it feels like a market adjustment gone south.”

One 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 China’s presence in Panama. “Look how prominent they’ve become,” one of the staffers said. In June, 2016, a major expansion of the canal was completed, and the first ship through was an enormous Chinese freighter, designed to fit the new dimensions. “I got a big American 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 Beijing have provided more than a hundred and fifty billion dollars in loan commitments to the region—some years, more than the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank combined. In less than two decades, trade between China and Latin America has increased twenty-seven-fold. Feeley said that he tried to alert Washington to China’s encroachment, but the new Administration was clearly uninterested in the region. “You don’t beat something with nothing, and right now I got nothing,” he said.

In late 2016, Feeley became concerned that Panamanian officials were negotiating with their Chinese counterparts to withdraw diplomatic recognition from Taiwan, a longtime antagonist of China. “We suspected that they were playing footsie, but they never let on,” he said. “I asked President Varela then, and again in February, 2017. He denied anything, and I reported it home. I rang bells all over Washington and got nothing there, either.” In June of last year, Panama’s government declared that it would no longer recognize Taiwan. Feeley found out an hour before the announcement; he had called Varela to discuss Martinelli’s case, and the President blurted out the China decision. Feeley subsequently learned that the Chinese and the Panamanians had hidden their discussions by meeting secretly in Madrid and Beijing.

The Taiwanese government furiously denounced Panama for succumbing to “checkbook diplomacy,” but Panamanian officials denied that the decision was motivated by economics. Then, last November, Varela travelled to Beijing and joined President Xi Jinping in a ceremony to celebrate their new friendship, at which he signed nineteen separate trade deals. At around the same time, the China Harbour Engineering Company began work in Panama on a hundred-and-sixty-five-million-dollar port.

“The fact is, it makes sense for Panama to recognize China, just as we do,” Feeley said. “The Chinese effect in commercial relations is going to grow exponentially. Its presence here is real, and it has the means and the will.” Panama could well become China’s Latin-American hub; the One Belt, One Road initiative, working with Varela’s government, is planning to build a railway from Panama City to near the Costa Rican border. But, Feeley added, “the Panamanians are naïve about the Chinese.” He told me that he had worked to persuade Panama’s security ministry not to sign a communications-technology deal with the Chinese, partly out of concern that they would use the infrastructure for espionage, as they have elsewhere. The Chinese company Huawei, which has headquarters in Panama, lobbied hard “to delay, divert, and get the contract.” In the end, the work was contracted to an American firm, General Dynamics, but the negotiations were difficult.

In a more prosaic illustration of soft power, Feeley noted that a welcome party for the new Chinese Ambassador had drawn an unusually illustrious crowd. “The President, who never used to go to these things, went to pay homage,” he complained. Varela’s government has quietly leased the Chinese a huge building plot, on the strip of land that juts into the ocean at the mouth of the canal, to use as the site of a new Embassy. Sailors on every ship in the canal will see the proof of China’s rising power, as they enter a waterway that once symbolized the global influence of the United States.

In public appearances, Feeley devised a way to explain away Trump’s offenses: “Well, the President’s words speak for themselves.” But, he said, “as time went on, I thought to myself, Dude, there’s only so long you can skate along with that.” After the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when Trump refused to condemn violence by white supremacists, Feeley reflected on a story that his grandfather Frank used to tell. On his way home from the war, he had been joined by a fellow New York City firefighter, an African-American man named Willy Brown. Assigned to a troop ship, the two had shown up to their bunk room, where they were faced by white men who told them, “Niggers aren’t allowed here.” There was a standoff, and violence was averted only when Willy said, “Frank, don’t worry—I know where to go.” Afterward, the men warned Frank, “You better sleep with one eye open, nigger lover.” For two weeks, Frank avoided the bunk room, spending his days playing craps on deck. “I didn’t get much sleep,” he liked to say, “but I won enough money to buy myself a DeSoto when I got home.”

Feeley said, “My granddad wasn’t a civil-rights activist—more informed by his Catholic faith. But he was very much a pro-civil-rights guy. I know it sounds hokey, but, after Charlottesville, I thought about how people really had to fight hard to protect those kinds of values, and how we’ve made so much progress and yet we know more has to be made—so for God’s sakes don’t fucking throw the thing in reverse.”

Over time, the moral failings at home seemed to compound the tactical failings abroad. In December, Feeley drafted his resignation letter to Trump. He was decorous in explaining his reasons. “As a junior foreign service officer, I signed an oath to serve faithfully the president and his administration in an apolitical fashion, even when I might not agree with certain policies,” he wrote. “My instructors made clear that if I believed I could not do that, I would be honor bound to resign. That time has come.”

On a trip to Washington, Feeley delivered the letter to a colleague at the White House, asking him to keep it to himself for a few weeks while he privately notified officials and staff members that he was resigning. “I really had the goddam thing synchronized down to the wire, like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ ” Feeley said. “I literally had a calendar of who I would tell when.” On the morning of January 11th, with his meetings complete, he put a message on the Embassy Web site, announcing that he was retiring, “for personal reasons.”

The next day, he and his team visited the canal, where the U.S.S. Fitzgerald was passing through. The ship had suffered a collision off the coast of Japan, killing seven servicemen, and Feeley wanted to film a message for the survivors. Cherie told me that, as he spoke to a small crowd, “I could see the press officer on the phone, looking concerned. Meanwhile, I looked down at my phone and saw, like, forty-seven WhatsApps from friends and family. I said, ‘John, something’s going on.’ ”

That morning, reports were circulating that Trump had referred to a number of developing countries as “shitholes.” As rumors spread that Feeley had resigned because of Trump’s gaffe, the State Department official in charge of public diplomacy, Steve Goldstein, reportedly leaked Feeley’s letter, announcing his real reasons. Afterward, Goldstein talked to reporters. “Everyone has a line that they will not cross,” he said. “If the Ambassador feels that he can no longer serve . . . then he has made the right decision for himself and we respect that.”

Feeley was incensed that the letter was leaked, but he said nothing publicly about his motivations. Instead, he made the series of videos in which he went looking for jobs around Panama City. He tried out as a taxi-driver, a fireman, a helicopter pilot, and a makeup assistant for an exuberant drag queen called La One Two. He returned to the barbershop in El Marañón, and bumbled through a disastrous audition as an apprentice barber. As the videos were posted online, people commented on the Embassy’s Facebook page, offering jobs. Most entries were jokes, but a few contained names and phone numbers. One was a straightforward proposition. “Ay, sweet daddy,” it read. “I will give you half my bed, and I’ll cook for you and you won’t have to work.”

On Feeley’s last day at the Embassy, his staff members surprised him with a farewell ceremony, in which they lowered the American flag and presented it to him. “After the anthem, they played Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ ” Feeley told me. “It was the only time I became publicly emotional.” In a video taken on the colonnaded porch of the Embassy, he can be heard saying, “I am proud of you—and I will always be a friend to everybody here today.” His voice rose until he was almost shouting. “And I will always help you feel proud of this flag. God bless you all.” Then he walked off, with one hand covering his eyes.

Feeley was not alone in wanting to resign. As morale sank in the State Department, veteran diplomats had been leaving, in what some called “the exodus.” David Rank, the senior American diplomat in China, stepped down last June, after Trump withdrew from the Paris accord. “You have decisions that the rest of the world fundamentally disagrees with,” Rank said recently. He recalled that, on September 11, 2001, “I got a call from the Embassy of an allied country seconds after the attack. The person said, ‘Whatever you need, you can count on us.’ Now that we pulled out of Paris and Iran, swept tariffs across the world, I wonder if we’re going to get that call again.”

In Latin America, the loss of expertise was particularly severe. William Brownfield, an Assistant Secretary of State who had served as Ambassador to Colombia and to Venezuela, decided to leave, and this February Tom Shannon, the department’s third-highest-ranking official and for decades the presiding expert on Venezuela, turned in his resignation. Jeffrey DeLaurentis, who in 2016 was nominated to be the first U.S. Ambassador to Cuba in half a century, is also leaving. One of Feeley’s colleagues explained the widespread dismay: “In terms of policy, what is there? Apart from migration issues, there’s the nafta reboot and stronger means being advocated for use against Venezuela. I don’t see much else. There is also the sense of an attempt to eviscerate anything Barack Obama did. I’ve never seen that before in my career.”

In March, Roberta Jacobson announced her resignation, after a three-decade career. Jacobson was appointed Ambassador to Mexico in 2015, but Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, stalled her confirmation for nearly a year. She took up her post in May, 2016, as Trump’s Presidential campaign got under way, so her time as Ambassador was spent mostly managing fallout from the new Administration. In her resignation, Jacobson avoided a direct rebuke, saying only that her decision to move on to “new challenges and adventures” was especially difficult because Mexico and the U.S. were at “a crucial moment.”

Privately, Jacobson was more forthcoming. “The level of coöperation we’ve gotten is something you don’t just build overnight,” she told me. “We are still the preferred commercial and economic partner, but we have to be trustworthy. The mere fact that in some sectors, especially in agriculture, Mexican buyers are beginning to look elsewhere should be a warning to us that we may be starting to lose a clear advantage. This could prove true in security or migration as well.”

Feeley pointed out that leftist leaders were in retreat throughout Latin America, and that popular movements were rejecting old habits of corrupt governance. It was, he said, “the greatest opportunity to recoup the moral high ground that we have had in decades.” Instead, we were abandoning the region. “I keep waiting for a Latin leader to paraphrase Angela Merkel and say, ‘We can no longer count on the Americans to provide leadership.’ ”

The U.S. diplomat in the region told me that it would take a long, concerted effort to restore the effectiveness of American diplomacy. “We’re into multiple years of repair needed already—say, five,” he said. “It’s bad.” As the country works to mend relationships with allies, it will face severe shortages of experts in the working details of global affairs, and of experienced mentors for new recruits. At the State Department, the diplomat added, “we don’t have arms. We don’t have a huge budget. All we have to compete with is the credibility of our senior leadership. If you don’t have those things, you’re dealing from a position of weakness. And the way to repair it is by putting people forward who can tackle problems—people like John.” He went on, “This is happening at a very dangerous time for our country. Some people liken it to an own goal. I’d say it’s more like a self-inflicted Pearl Harbor.”

Jorge Guajardo, the former Mexican Ambassador, told me that the loss of prestige was already evident. “In Latin America, the relationship with the U.S. has gone from aspirational to transactional,” he said. “In countries like Mexico, we used to say, when there was a case of corruption, ‘If this happened in the U.S.A. . . .’ But we don’t say that anymore. There used to be a kind of deference to the U.S. Not anymore. If something doesn’t benefit Mexico, we’ll walk away.” In the past, he said, Latin-American countries looking for business partners might select a U.S. company over one from another country, because America represented higher ethical standards. Since Trump’s election, he said, things had changed. “There’s this idea that the States is just like the rest of us. That’s the saddest thing to me.”

Before Feeley left Panama, he secured a job as a commentator for Univision, the Miami-based Spanish-language media conglomerate. (Univision also employs Jorge Ramos, a Mexican-American journalist who had a public confrontation with Trump during his Presidential campaign.) He and Cherie got an apartment in Miami, on the thirty-eighth floor of a tower on Brickell Avenue.

In late March, soon after Feeley returned to the U.S., I went to see him. He showed me around the apartment, distractedly waving toward a new leather couch and indicating the view of the city. After exchanging a few logistical details with Cherie—they were headed to the Bahamas for the Easter break—Feeley suggested that we go outside to talk.

The Miami River runs behind the apartment building, and we sat on a bench, looking at yachts gliding past. Feeley had dressed for the South Florida weather—he wore a blue polo shirt, jeans, and desert boots—but he was still feeling in limbo. He hadn’t yet started at Univision. “It’s pretty weird,” he said. “I’ve always been part of a self-selecting structure, and I don’t have it here. I played organized sports, went to a boys’ school, served in the Marines and then the Foreign Service.” He seemed daunted by the prospect of starting a new career. “I had a pretty easy run to sixty-five without really having to reinvent myself,” he said. Still, he was aware that his former colleagues were in a much more difficult situation. “Unless you’re at the senior-most levels of the Department of State, I would never think that others should do as I did,” he said.

Among the people I spoke to who had remained at State, several were cautiously optimistic about Mike Pompeo, who had replaced Tillerson. The U.S. diplomat in Latin America said, “We’re seeing Pompeo doing repair work already. The crystal-clear message we’re getting is ‘We need you.’ We’re hearing the same from C.I.A.” Feeley was less hopeful, but he believed that Foreign Service officers were willing to work with the Trump Administration. “I don’t know of a single Trump supporter who is an F.S.O.,” he said. “But I also don’t know of a single F.S.O. who hopes for failure, myself included. Far from the Alex Jones caricature of a bunch of pearl-clutching, cookie-pushing effetes, we have an entire corps of people who will do everything they can to successfully implement American foreign policy, as it is determined by the national leaders—to include Mike Pompeo.” But, Feeley suggested, Pompeo would need to moderate his boss’s instincts. “I just do not believe that, with Trump’s rhetoric and a lot of his policy actions, we are going to recoup our leadership position in the world,” he said. “Because the evidence is already in, and we’re not. We’re not just walking off the field. We’re taking the ball and throwing a finger at the rest of the world.”

When I asked Feeley whether he thought Trump was a traitor, he looked startled and turned away. Staring out at the river, he replied, “I don’t know. I couldn’t talk about that.”

“You’re a private citizen now.”

“Yeah, but I still wouldn’t—there are still things. I wouldn’t comment on it.” Feeley wouldn’t look at me.

“Are you worried that he is?” I asked.

“You mean, like, ‘Manchurian Candidate’ shit?”

Finally, Feeley ventured an answer. Trump was “clearly a flawed man, much more flawed than other Presidents I’ve served,” he said. “The world is an unstable and complex enough place that we, and the U.S. President, should not be the cause of more chaos. But I would not comment on traitor. Traitor’s a big thing.”

Feeley’s new job at Univision will also involve diplomacy, of a sort: he plans to travel the U.S. with a camera crew, talking to Americans in the way that he talked with Panamanians in videos for social media. “As much as I dislike what the President says, I also know a lot of his supporters,” he said. “They’re my Marine Corps friends—they’re my brothers.” His goal was to facilitate honest talk about immigration. “My own desired end state is for a United States that can control its own borders but also welcome the trade that comes across,” he said. “I want to go out into Middle America and talk to people like my U.S. Marine buddies, and ask them why they want a wall. And I’ll let them speak their piece. Then I’ll talk with a migrant and ask him about his own experiences. And I’ll get the two of them to talk to each other.”

Laughing, he said, “I’m the reverse crossover—the opposite of Gloria Estefan. I started north and went south.” Turning serious again, he said, “The bottom line is, I know the lunch-pail guys have legitimate grievances. I also know that they and the migrants have more in common than not. So, if I can broker a conversation, then that’s what I’ll do. It may not melt hearts like ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas,’ but I’ll give it my best shot.” ♦