President-elect Donald Trump dislikes special envoys, with reason. Too many presidents and secretaries of State appoint them for two reasons: First, to bypass Senate confirmation for controversial or unpopular figures and, second, to bypass rather than reform State Department dysfunction.
In the first instance, President Joe Biden appointed former Secretary of State John Kerry to be his “climate czar,” for example. Biden understood the likelihood of Senate confirmation for the jet-setting Kerry was unlikely, given Kerry’s arrogance, his waste of taxpayer funds, and his laments about the First Amendment rights of his policy opponents.
The same held true for Biden energy envoy Amos Hochstein, whose private sector lobbying and questions over conflicts of interest also made him unconfirmable. Hochstein ran roughshod over the established bureaucracy to reverse State Department support for the EastMed pipeline and legitimize Hezbollah’s energy claims. As Biden declined mentally, Hochstein essentially acted as the principal of his own department and without any check to his agenda. The problem from the standpoint of law and the Constitution, however, was the (confirmed) Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources whose portfolio Hochstein duplicated.
A desire to bypass State Department dysfunction could explain Biden’s appointment of Johnnie Carson to be his “Special Presidential Representative for U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit Implementation.” After all, if Biden believed his own Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs to be competent, why duplicate the position? The same holds true with his various special envoys for Sudan. If the U.S. ambassador is competent, even in the face of the tremendous complexity of that country’s civil war, why would the U.S. need an additional envoy? Conversely, if prestige were the issue, why not simply appoint the envoy as ambassador and reassign the other ambassador to a simpler problem set, like St. Lucia?
The Kurds are increasingly central to U.S. policy in the region, but they fall across bureaucracies.
Sometimes, however, issues emerge that the State Department is not competent to address. This is the case with the Kurds. The Kurds are increasingly central to U.S. policy in the region, but they fall across bureaucracies. Iraq, Iran, and Syria fall within the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, for example, while policy toward Kurds who live in Turkey is under the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. Taken together, the Kurds number at least 40 million and, if lumped together, would represent the fourth most populous country in the region after Egypt, Iran, and Turkey, but under the current framework, country teams treat them as a secondary issue to the country in which they live. The U.S. Embassy in Ankara and the Turkey desk in the State Department, for example, parrots Turkish talking points about Kurdish terrorism for fear of antagonizing Turkey’s mercurial and often racist rulers. The Pentagon, meanwhile, considers the same Kurds whom many on the Turkey desk slander as essential partners to counter Islamic State terror.
In the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, the State Department, Pentagon, and Central Intelligence Agency all worked with different Kurds, often at cross purposes. That policy dysfunction continues as key Kurdish leaders struggle to get U.S. visas because the embassies to which they apply have other priorities.
The U.S. needs a Kurdish policy that coordinates among departments and ties diplomatic, informational, military, and economic policies together into a coherent strategy.
A special envoy also could plug other policy holes. Iraqi Kurds engage in any number of schemes that take advantage of lack of U.S. policy coordination. Corruption within Iraqi Kurdistan is legendary; the Barzani regime may exceed the Aliyevs in Azerbaijan and even Vladimir Putin in Russia for the sheer audacity of its schemes, most recently inflating the price of cancer testing more than fortyfold. Kurdish leaders openly counterfeit American products like Jack Daniel’s whiskey and defy multibillion-dollar arbitration findings. In one recent example, a Kurdish official went from a news organization tied to Kurdistan Regional President Nechirvan Barzani, claimed asylum in the United States, and now reportedly collects a five-figure monthly stipend to illegally lobby Congress as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of the regime he said in his asylum application oppresses him. Nor is he alone. The Barzanis today pay people to infiltrate Trump’s world, thinking they can both immunize themselves from the Department of Justice and stake claims to be the voice of all Kurds, even though they represent only a tiny sliver.
The White House and State Department, meanwhile, simply ignores Iranian Kurds. This is self-defeating given that the protests over the September 16, 2022, murder of Jina “Mahsa” Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, shook the regime to its core.
The U.S. needs a Kurdish policy that coordinates among departments and ties diplomatic, informational, military, and economic policies together into a coherent strategy. To support simultaneously Syrian Kurds and those who bomb them makes no policy sense and breeds cynicism and resentment. To accept intelligence from anti-Kurdish regimes like Turkey and ignore intelligence from Kurds that may reflect poorly or expose falsehoods in Turkish dossiers corrupts the entire intelligence process.
Given Kurdish corruption and organized crime, it is also essential that the U.S. Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service can access the same ombudsman with whom the Pentagon, State Department, and Central Intelligence Agency coordinate.
The United States may not be prepared to recognize an independent Kurdistan. This need not be an impediment, as most Kurdish groups today—including the much-maligned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)—long ago abandoned separatism in favor of federalism within existing borders. Still, the lack of an overarching policy toward the Kurds remains a self-imposed constraint to effective U.S. policy. Trump and Secretary of State-designee Marco Rubio can fix this by making an exception to their no-envoy policy and by appointing the first U.S. Special Envoy to Kurds and Kurdistan.
