Who’s on deck at the ship of state?

As President Donald Trump prepared to make his longest overseas trip yet—to Asia in November—the stakes stayed high. Trump declared weeks before the trip he might visit the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, a gesture that may taunt North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who threatened to attack the United States after Trump pledged “fire and fury” over potential missile launches by Pyongyang.

Pulling off so critical a tour takes detailed minute-by-minute planning and careful negotiations, yet key U.S. diplomatic posts remained vacant 10 months into the Trump administration. Of the five countries on the president’s itinerary (Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, and the Philippines), two do not yet have ambassadors—and one is South Korea, which stands most to be affected by any conflict with the Kim regime.

In addition, the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs is currently led by a temporary acting official, Susan Thornton, a career Foreign Service officer appointed to serve as a deputy assistant secretary by President Barack Obama. Long before Trump’s tense standoff with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the East Asian bureau was considered a pivotal office, held by luminaries like W. Averell Harriman and Dean Rusk in the Cold War era, and formative for leading diplomats of the post–Cold War era like Richard Holbrooke and Paul Wolfowitz. But the U.S. Senate has not since July 2013 confirmed an official for the seat Thornton now occupies.

Much has been made over a growing distance between Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and President Trump and the president’s rumored search for Tillerson’s replacement just eight months after the former Exxon Mobil chief executive took on the job. Such a rift is serious enough for U.S. stability: The State Department, created in 1789, is considered the senior Cabinet-level office of the executive branch. The secretary of state is the first Cabinet member in the line of succession should the president, vice president, and leaders of each house in Congress become unable to serve—a scenario not unthinkable after 9/11.

But the greater threat under the current State Department, according to senior policymakers in and outside the government, is the number of vacancies remaining at senior levels. While the president has created big headlines on foreign policy—and raised the temperature in relations with North Korea, Iran, and others—lasting change requires hands to steer so big a ship of state. Further, the sheer number of unconfirmed top positions, as Trump nears the end of his first year in office, leaves Obama-era appointees and career Foreign Service officers carrying out day-to-day policy, in some cases with greater authority than they had under the former president.

The inside joke, say newcomers and old-timers alike: The president may be lord of the headlines, but at Foggy Bottom it feels like the ninth year of the Obama administration.

“The slow process of getting people appointed has undermined what Trump has tried to do, but more importantly it has undermined the national interest,” said Suzanne Scholte, president of the Defense Forum Foundation and chair of the North Korea Freedom Coalition. “Not in all my years in government have I seen anything like this, and it’s detrimental to putting any policy into action.”

Of nine senior official positions listed on the State Department website, only two slots have been filled under Trump. (For a third post, the undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, Trump on Sept. 28 nominated Irwin Steven Goldstein, a New York marketing executive.) Only one of two deputy secretary of state slots have been filled, and nearly all of some 24 bureaus headed by an assistant secretary remain vacant. Overseas, 49 of 188 ambassador posts remained vacant as of mid-October.

OVERALL, according to Senate records, the White House has presented five nominations for senior-level positions. Two received Senate confirmation, and hearings to confirm two more were held Oct. 18.

Perhaps complicating the confirmation process: the rift between the president and Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Corker after both began trading insults via public statements last month.

After Trump tweeted that the Republican senator from Tennessee “begged” him for an endorsement and “didn’t have the guts” to run for reelection, Corker responded saying the White House “has become an adult day care center.” In a further rebuke, Corker told The New York Times Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless international threats that could set our nation “on the path to World War III.”

Corker drew praise from The Wall Street Journal and leading conservative columnists. But Scholte and others involved in foreign policy issues with Congress and the White House believe it was the wrong tack for the Foreign Relations chairman: “What Corker did gives ammunition to Democrats who already are stalling, plus it’s beside the point when both the White House and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are dragging their feet,” she said.

Like many Trump supporters, Scholte admits Trump’s chaotic approach has in some ways provided a needed dose of not-diplomacy-as-usual, not only with recalcitrant North Korea but also with China. (China recently agreed to stiffen sanctions against Kim’s regime.) Pressure also needs to focus on aiding North Korean people, convincing China to stop repatriating escapees back to North Korea, she said: “The people are lost in these blazes of rhetoric. It should be in China’s interest to work with the United States, in their interest to have a nuclear-free peninsula and region.”

‘The slow process of getting people appointed has undermined what Trump has tried to do, but more importantly it has undermined the national interest.’ —Suzanne Scholte

That’s a longer-term project requiring committed officials who can lay groundwork. Corker, in a further interview with The Washington Post, said currently “the greatest diplomatic activities we have are with China,” but accused Trump of repeatedly undermining his own secretary of state.

PRESIDENT TRUMP came into office pledging to slash the State Department budget by one-third, and in May Tillerson announced he would seek employee input on an overhaul of the department to accommodate the budget cuts and streamline a bloated bureaucracy. Four months later Tillerson unveiled what he said was the first phase of that plan and promised more details “in the weeks ahead.” Now dubbed a “redesign,” the Tillerson preview was underwhelming: Nearly half the plan dealt with information technology issues, and the rest sounded like repackaged versions of 2010 and 2015 departmental reviews heavy on jargon and nebulous goals like “streamlining policy and presence.”

That leaves the department treading water, without senior staff with clear policy mandates to guide approximately 30,000 employees worldwide. It also means that more and more, whether by default or by design, key foreign policy decisions happen three ways: among a small core of advisers who have not undergone the Senate confirmation process and therefore lack accountability to the public; under cover of the intelligence community; and under leadership from Obama administration holdovers.

One senior adviser at the State Department told me “definitely” the vacancies aggravate the speed with which crucial decisions can be made, and make even experienced officers timid because the chain of command within any given bureau may be murky. While Trump has taken initiative on major policy issues—changing immigration and refugee resettlement practices through executive orders or reinstating a block on federal funding of abortion and related services abroad (the Mexico City policy)—it’s difficult for those policy about-faces to register throughout the bureaucracy without more political appointees in place.

Starving the State Department of leadership, said former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, is no way to achieve needed reforms. Writing in The Washington Post earlier this year, the seven-term Michigan Republican said, “Aggressive diplomacy requires personnel who know the countries, the issues and how to navigate complex social, cultural and political webs. At the moment, we’re on a dangerous path to losing that capability through unfilled posts.”

A further danger: the latitude unfilled posts give Obama holdovers. Given the high-level vacancies, agency officials in some cases have assumed more authority than they had under Obama, adding to what some insiders call a resistance movement within the State Department akin to the protesters who have taken to the streets against Trump’s presidency this year. “The resistance movement in government is real,” said Scholte.

HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS on the left and right, plus longtime analysts, were shocked when Trump in October permanently lifted most sanctions against Sudan, a move initiated late in Obama’s term. The move was spearheaded by the former president’s Chargé d’Affaires Steven Koutsis and driven, insiders say, by intelligence agencies. Trump left Koutsis as the top official in Sudan.

The United States has not had an ambassador in Khartoum since 1996, when President Bill Clinton recalled the ambassador shortly before imposing sanctions.

In his 1997 executive order, Clinton cited “continued support for international terrorism … the prevalence of human rights violations, including slavery and the denial of religious freedom” as key factors and threats deserving economic censure. At the time, a broad coalition of Democrats and Republicans urged him to go even further.

Yet multiple officials in the Obama administration pressed for lifting sanctions, even as fighting and atrocities continued. Appointed last year, Koutsis became a key conduit for measuring progress toward finally ending sanctions, and he set up five tracks of measurement that departed from the Clinton categories. They included cessation of offensive military activity, cooperation on counterterrorism, and improvement of humanitarian access.

Even as Sudan closed 27 churches this year, Koutsis said the government had made “positive steps” toward meeting the conditions necessary to lift sanctions. He parsed words over some government assaults, saying they were defensive rather than offensive.

Tom Catena, the only surgeon working in Sudan’s war-torn Nuba Mountains over the last 10 years, told CNN there have been no new offensives or aerial bombardments in his region, but “there has not been a drop of humanitarian aid reaching us here. … Simply said, not all of the conditions have been met to justify a permanent lifting of sanctions.”

Asked about these violations plus brutal attacks in Darfur and elsewhere, Koutsis told reporters, “None of these other issues were the point of sanctions, and none of these other issues, therefore, should be linked to the lifting of sanctions.”

Sudan Research, Analysis, and Advocacy blog author Eric Reeves said Koutsis had become “the front man” in a long effort by Obama’s CIA director John Brennan to restore U.S. relations with Sudan. “What came as a surprise,” said Reeves, “is that a Trump State Department is evidently content to allow Koutsis to remain the senior U.S. diplomat in Khartoum.” But as Reeves pointed out, the senior officers who might question and review such policies and practices aren’t in place.