Dropping like flies

A. Wess Mitchell, the top diplomat in charge of European affairs, will resign from the State Department next month, creating a key vacancy at a time when European leaders are questioning President Trump’s commitment to historic alliances.

Mitchell, 41, cited personal and professional reasons in a Jan. 4 letter of resignation he submitted to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. His last day as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs is Feb. 15.

“As the administration completes its second year in office, I feel that I have completed what I set out to do in taking this position,” he wrote, citing the development of a Europe strategy and helping Pompeo transition into the job after Rex Tillerson was fired in March.

  WaPo

He set out to destroy our relationship with Europe??

"I believe that the time has come for me to spend more time with my young family, who have endured many days without me over the past several months.”

The age-old excuse.

Mitchell joins a revolving door of senior officials leaving the Trump administration at the beginning of its third year. The departure comes almost a year after H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser who was instrumental in bringing Mitchell to the administration, was abruptly dismissed.

It also creates another vacancy in the ranks of senior officials at the State Department. Currently, six of the 24 spots are awaiting Senate confirmation.

Mitchell came to the State Department from a think tank he co-founded, the Center for European Policy Analysis. He had just published a book, Unquiet Frontier, in which he and Jakub Grygiel criticized President Barack Obama’s foreign policy and argued for the “renovation” of alliances. Grygiel also joined the State Department, working on European issues before leaving last year.

[...]

In Central and Eastern Europe, Mitchell scrapped the Obama-era policy of shunning authoritarian leaders over human rights violations and treated them as potential partners.

So, maybe that was what he set out to do.

On the other hand...

“We’re entering an era of big-power competition,” he said. “The West, U.S. and our allies are underprepared for that transition.”

[...]

“We have to compete for positive influence,” he said. “What we can’t do is continue the practice of the recent past — of approaching a NATO ally with whom we have some legitimate disagreements on domestic policy, approaching them from a position of criticism, freezing them out of meetings, criticizing them publicly, and then somehow assuming that those countries are going to remain westward looking in their strategic orientation.”

So, my family needs me.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.