Before President Donald Trump took office for a second time, European officials thought they had him figured out. He was transactional, they said, a man motivated by a good deal.

Some bragged they knew how to do business with him based on their interactions with the self-proclaimed deal maker in his first term.

They were in for a rude awakening. Trump in 2025 is not the same as he was in 2017.

Like with most things in Trump’s tenure so far, the president’s second-term playbook on diplomacy marks a significant shift from the past. One Arab diplomat in Washington said it’s easier to do business with the Russians than the new administration.

The White House has wrested global affairs from professional diplomats and dialed up its policy on everything from Russia to climate change, foreign assistance and global trade, rattling the State Department officials who are supposed to implement foreign policy on a day-to-day basis.

That shock is cascading through ministries across Europe, the Middle East and Africa that sustained the United States' global alliances for a generation and underpinned the rules-based global order.

“It’s disturbing and unprofessional,” said Camille Grand, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and formerly a senior official at NATO. “The change was sharp, brutal and of great magnitude. Civil servants are terrified, left unable to express U.S. policies because they don’t have access to the big bosses.”

A senior U.S. administration official said that diplomats around the world know who they can contact at embassies and the State Department in Washington is operating normally. Key posts have been filled across most regional and operational bureaus, even without Senate-confirmed appointees, the official said, and any confusion is likely because of the fact that the world is adjusting to an “America First” foreign policy.

One diplomat in a key European capital said they have been unable to discuss policy with Washington since Trump’s inauguration because their American counterpart has had no guidance and their boss quit just as Trump took power.

Another Arab diplomat said everything is being handled through Washington now and other institutional channels are useless, with some American officials apparently left out of the loop entirely. Nobody knows who is a decision-maker on the American side, several diplomats said.

In a key Middle Eastern country, U.S. embassy staff were described as completely absent, leaving their peers without briefings after the ouster of Bashar Assad in Syria.

As the U.S. withdraws, other countries are stepping up to fill the gap. In Turkey, a key NATO ally, it’s now the Netherlands that convenes like-minded countries to coordinate on issues ranging from intelligence to travel advisories, all roles that Washington used to play, according to one envoy.

It is difficult, a senior European diplomat said, to find the appropriate counterparts across the board, partly because many senior positions still need to be filled. And those who are left are worried about keeping their jobs amid Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency cost-cutting measures.

Washington-based embassy staff of one Group of Seven nation, including the ambassador, say they have been left in the dark in recent weeks with the usual channels of communication shut down as State Department officials brace for staffing cuts.

To be sure, any transition from a Democratic to a Republican administration sees top State Department officials and ambassadors resign, leaving their posts vacant for months on end as successors await Senate confirmation. But that normal period of confusion has been turbo-charged by Trump, who has stunned world leaders with the pace and breadth of his foreign policy disruption since taking office.

Some countries though have welcomed the dramatic change in approach compared with the Biden administration. While the formal channels may not be working as normal, those governments with a direct line in to Trump — including several in the Middle East — have found that they can sometimes get things done more effectively than they could with Biden.

“I have always had business-like, strictly business-like, but at the same time pragmatic and trust-based, I would say, relationships with the current President of the United States,” Russia’s Vladimir Putin told an interviewer on Jan. 24.

Still, some State Department employees are anxious their departments could be merged with others, while some fear entire bureaus could get axed for focusing on areas — such as climate, human rights and refugees — that don’t align with Trump’s “America First” approach.

One European official said communication with their U.S. peers on climate diplomacy had completely broken down.

The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy blueprint, which was led by the current White House budget director Russ Vought, previously warned that “large swaths of the State Department’s workforce are left-wing” and that the agency needs to be “meaningfully streamlined.”

In Africa, the administration‘s move to freeze all foreign aid and then cut 83% of contracts administered by the United States Agency for International Development means Washington has effectively ghosted hundreds of partners on the ground, some of whom had been working with the U.S. for decades.

South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool has been declared ‘persona non grata’ after criticizing the Trump administration. Rasool had also complained that he had no one to deal with at the State Department’s Africa division.

U.S. diplomatic envoys in several European cities say they have scaled back on attending and hosting cultural events that were long a soft power tool for cultivating influence.

There has also been a broader collapse in trust, the official said, where long-established confidentiality among foreign ministers could no longer be relied upon in G-7 settings, especially on sensitive issues like Gaza and Israel.

Some traditional allies are even considering revising their stance on intelligence sharing with Washington, according to officials familiar with the matter who, like others cited in this article, were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

In practice, given the level of integration, it’d be difficult for some allies to alter intelligence sharing with the U.S., with some standing to lose with such a move.

The difficulties in maintaining any semblance of a solid U.S. foreign policy have spilled into the public realm, with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio canceling his meeting with EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas at the very last minute, because of “scheduling issues” when she was already in D.C. and had publicly announced the meeting.

“It’s total improvisation,” said Grand, the former NATO official. “Everything depends on the president’s moods.”

(Kavita Mokha, Michael Nienaber, Arne Delfs, Fiona MacDonald, Paul Richardson, Samy Adghirni, Peter Martin, Jim Wyss, Chris Miller, Nick Wadhams, Alberto Nardelli, Aaron Eglitis, Patrick Sykes, Milda Seputyte, Justin Sink and Flavia Krause-Jackson contributed to this report.)

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