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With North Korean nuclear threats escalating into a genuine international crisis, the ordinary thing to do would be to have our ambassadors in Seoul, Beijing, and Tokyo keep in close consultation with the relevant authorities in those countries. A problem: As Evelyn Cheng points out at CNBC, we do not have ambassadors in South Korea, China, or Japan.There is no undersecretary of state for East Asia. There is no ambassador to India or Australia. There are in fact more than 100 senior positions vacant in the State Department.At some point, Donald J. Trump is going to start having to do the actual work of being president.Trump has nominated Iowa governor Terry Branstad to serve in Beijing, but his nomination foundered in the Senate because the Trump administration was unable to complete much of the necessary paperwork. A nominee to the Tokyo embassy was not selected until March and still has not been confirmed. No nominee to South Korea was even under consideration as of Friday.Salutary inaction often is the best medicine in government. We could close the Small Business Administration tomorrow, and the republic would stand. I am pleased that Betsy DeVos is the secretary of education, and I hope she is the last one. By all means, shutter the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Federal Consumer Information Center, fire the employees, burn the records, knock down the buildings, and salt the earth, until nothing is left of them but sad stories.But let’s have an ambassador in China.Trump, as a businessman with independent and populist instincts, taps into a very old and deep tradition in American political life: The desire to “run the government like a business.” One of the problems with running the government like a business is that the government is not a business. It is a different kind of undertaking, and it makes no more sense to try to run it like a business than it would to try to run your church like a business, or a Girl Scout troop . . .. . . “Personnel is policy,” the proverb goes, and Trump’s policy is, for the moment, not to have a policy. He does not know what he wants to do about health care or the nuclear terrorists in Pyongyang, and even if he did, he does not have people in place to do it.
