America says it’s back. But where are its ambassadors?

CERTAIN SIGNIFICANT people were nowhere to be seen as Joe Biden touched down last week in the three countries he visited on his first trip abroad as president: American ambassadors. Mr Biden has yet to nominate envoys to Britain, Belgium or Switzerland, much less to guide them through the bog of Senate confirmation.

In fact Mr Biden has not nominated an ambassador to any of the countries—from Japan to Germany to Canada—that with America comprise the G7, the alliance of prosperous democracies he this month tried to rally to a global contest with the autocratic model of Russia and China. He has not picked an ambassador to the European Union, whose leaders he also met.

He has nominated a representative to NATO, another alliance he called upon. She is Julianne Smith, a deputy national security adviser to Mr Biden when he was vice-president. But she has not been confirmed, and, since the president nominated her only on June 15th, she is unlikely to be for quite some time. America may be back, as Mr Biden likes to say, but its ambassadors are still a long way off.

The impact of an absent ambassador is hard to measure. A chargé d’affaires, generally an experienced foreign-service officer, stands in, and, during the pandemic, ...