Eleven new ambassadors recently won accreditation to represent their countries in the United States—but any casual observer would be hard-pressed to find a more controversial group of diplomats based on a quick online search of their past public and private comments.

The State Department has already declared one of them persona non grata: South Africa’s Ebrahim Rasool. As of press time, the veteran anti-apartheid activist was “all packed up and looking forward to returning to South Africa,” telling journalist he was leaving Washington “with no regrets.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he had to be gone by Friday, after saying Rasool, 62, was “no longer welcome in our great country” and that he was “a race-baiting politician” who hates President Donald Trump. A lower-level State Department official called him “obscene.”

Rasool’s expulsion after only a few months on the job—a virtually unheard-of occurrence along Embassy Row—follows a webinar organized by a South African think tank, during which Rasool accused Trump of “mobilizing a supremacism” and trying to “project white victimhood as a dog whistle” as the white population faced becoming a minority in the United States.

Earlier this month, US-South African relations took a turn for the worse after passage of a new expropriation law Trump says discriminates against white farmers. This led the White House to declare an end to all US federal funding to South Africa, which in 2023 came to $440 million.

Trump, urged on by his South African-born friend Elon Musk, later wrote on Truth Social that South Africa is being “terrible” to farmers, and he added that any farmer with a family “seeking to flee for reasons of safety will be invited” to the US with a “rapid pathway” to citizenship.

Rasool, a lifelong activist in the African National Congress who also has expressed past support of Hamas, lashed out at the White House, calling Trump’s claims about land being confiscated a “clear untruth.

Yechiel Leiter, supporter of West Bank annexation, named Israel’s new envoy

It’s a pretty safe bet that Rasool wouldn’t have been best buddies with Michael Leiter, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pick to replace Michael Herzog—brother of Israeli President Isaac Herzog—as Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

Like former President Joe Biden, the 65-year-old Leiter was born in Scranton, Pa. An Orthodox Jew and an ordained rabbi, he has a long history of activism in the far-right extremist Jewish Defense League, which was formed by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

In 1978, at the age of 18, he immigrated to the Jewish state and joined the Israel Defense Forces as a combat medic. By then, he ardently supported annexation of the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since the Six-Day War of 1967.

No surprise, then, that Leiter resides in the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut, south of Jerusalem.

The new ambassador’s relationship with Netanyahu goes back several decades when he was Netanyahu’s chief of staff at Israel’s Finance Ministry. In 2008, Leiter ran for a Knesset seat but lost; three years later, he was elected chairman of the Israel Ports Authority.

Leiter has a bachelor’s degree in law and political science, as well as a master’s in international relations—both from Washington DC’s Catholic University of America—along with a PhD in political philosophy from Israel’s University of Haifa. His doctoral thesis was on the influence of the Hebrew Bible on John Locke’s theory of consensual government.

On a personal note, Leiter has seven children; on Nov. 10, 2023, his eldest son, 39-year-old Moshe, was killed while fighting Hamas during Israel’s current war in Gaza. The ambassador discussed this loss in a conversation hosted by The Tikvah Podcast. Upon Trump’s inauguration, he said that “a true friend of Israel and the Jewish people has returned to the White House.”

Leiter sparked fury last month after he accused Egypt of “deliberately undermining its peace agreements with Israel.” The ambassador claimed that Cairo was “building up an enhanced Egyptian force in Sinai.”

His comments were so serious that Ron Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, had to be dispatched to meet with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to ease tensions and reaffirm diplomatic ties that were established in 1979 following the Camp David peace accords.

Russia’s Alexander Darchiev has sharply criticized US policy in the past

Another controversial newcomer is Moscow’s man in DC: Alexander Darchiev. His appointment, which received the State Department’s blessing in early March after lengthy talks in Istanbul, comes six months after the departure of Russia’s previous envoy here, Anatoly Antonov.

Yet Darchiev, 64, is widely known for his denunciations of the West.

In March 2022, he told the Interfax news agency that “Washington will need time to get used to the fact that its hegemony is in the past … and will have to reckon with the national interests of Russia, which has its own sphere of influence and responsibility.”

The Trump administration, which has taken a dramatically favorable view of Russian President Vladimir Putin, may actually welcome such an attitude. But it certainly didn’t score points with John J. Sulivan, who was US ambassador to the Kremlin when Joe Biden was president.

Reuters reported that Sullivan described in his memoirs how Darchiev became “visibly enraged” during a meeting at the foreign ministry in Moscow, after Biden had called Putin a war criminal.

“When I finished, he started screaming at me in a profane tirade that I should not come into the ministry with such a belligerent attitude,” wrote Sullivan, who declined further comment on the incident when contacted by Reuters.

Darchiev was ambassador to Canada for 2014 to 2021. Before that, in the late 2000s, he held positions at the embassy in Washington, and for the past four years had headed the Russian Foreign Ministry’s North American Department. Fluent in English and French, he graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1983, and has a PhD in historical sciences.

“Technically, this is a downgrade,” a ministry official told the Moscow Times. Separately, an ex-Kremlin official agreed with that assessment, telling the paper: “I wouldn’t be surprised if, for the next few years, Darchiev’s primary focus is simply getting Russia’s embassy and consulates in the US running smoothly again.”

Alexander Gabuev, head of the Berlin-based Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, told that same newspaper that Darchiev is a consummate professional.

“He’s a functionary to the core—an Americanist who has spent his career on the US and Canada portfolio,” Gabuev said. “He can be utterly charming when needed, or a hardliner when the situation calls for it. He’s pragmatic and will strictly follow instructions from the Kremlin, doing only what’s possible given the state of relations and the orders he receives.”

Lord Peter Mandelson raises eyebrows as new British ambassador

Britain’s new ambassador has also made headlines—and not always for the right reasons.

Lord Peter Mandelson, 71 replaced Dame Karen Pierce in February as British envoy here. Jewish and gay, Mandelson is the grandson of Norman Levy Mandelson, who founded the Harrow United Synagogue—the largest Orthodox Jewish congregation anywhere in Europe.

Among other things, Mandelson was a committed communist during his teenage years, and in 1978 he even attended a Soviet-organized youth festival in Havana, Cuba.

Mandelson—one of the best-known figures in British politics, Mandelson became the Labour Party’s director of communications in 1985, earning the nickname “Prince of Darkness.” He was first elected to the House of Commons in 1992. Six years later he became secretary of state for trade and industry, and in 1999 he was appointed secretary of state for Northern Ireland.

As Britain’s European commissioner for trade (2004-08) and member of parliament until 2004, Mandelson later fiercely opposed Brexit. He was elevated to the House of Lords as a life peer in 2008, and in 2010 co-founded Global Counsel, a London-based lobbying firm. Among his top corporate clients: Alibaba, TikTok, Lazard, Shell and Deutsche Bank.

In 2018, the year after Trump’s first inauguration, reported BBC News, Mandelson told the Evening Standard that the new president was a “bully.” And in 2019, during an interview with an Italian journalist, he described Trump as “reckless” and “a danger to the world.”

That led Trump’s campaign advisor, Chris LaCivita, to sharply criticize the British government for replacing Pierce “with an absolute moron.”

Nevertheless, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has known Mandelson for decades, vouched for his old friend.

“I am delighted to appoint Lord Mandelson to be the next British ambassador,” Starmer declared in a press release. “The United States is one of our most important allies, and as we move into a new chapter in our friendship, Peter will bring unrivalled experience to the role and take our partnership from strength to strength.”

In accepting the new appointment, Mandelson noted that “we face challenges in Britain but also big opportunities, and it will be a privilege to work with the government to land those opportunities—both for our economy and our nation’s security—and to advance our historic alliance with the United States.”

Yet controversy continues to dog him. On March 3, Mandelson was widely panned by British media for telling ABC News This Week that Ukraine should give “unequivocal backing to the initiative that President Trump is taking” to broker peace with Russia, and that the Ukrainians must “commit to a ceasefire and defy the Russians to follow.”

That TV appearance led Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, to remark that “our man in DC should be securing US protection for our brave Ukrainian allies, not telling President Zelenskyy what to do.”

Added former Tory foreign secretary James Cleverly: “The UK ambassador to Washington isn’t meant to communicate his own opinion, he is meant to communicate the UK government opinion. [Foreign Secretary David] Lammy and Starmer need to grip this.”

Poland’s new envoy is an ambassador in all but name

Bogdan Klich, Poland’s new representative in Washington, is so controversial that he won’t even get to hold the title of ambassador.

According to the nonprofit news outlet Notes from Poland, President Andrzej Duda—an ally of the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party—has refused to sign off on the nomination.

The appointment of Klich, a senator from the main ruling Civic Platform (PO) party, has also been criticized by PiS figures given that he has strongly attacked Trump in the past, it reported.

“Senator Klich will soon arrive in Washington and take over the management of the Polish embassy,” Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski told broadcaster RMF. “He probably won’t be an ambassador because the president announced that he won’t sign off on nominations for anyone—especially not for Senator Klich—but he will become the head of the mission.”

Last month, the website reported, Duda noted that Klich served as defense minister at the time of the Smolensk disaster, when a Polish military plane crashed in Russia, killing then-president Lech Kaczyński and 95 others.

“Radosław Sikorski and [Prime Minister] Donald Tusk want to send as Polish ambassador to the US, to the world’s largest military power, where the safety and health of the president is in a category unimaginable to Poles, a man who was defense minister when the president of Poland died in a plane crash in a military plane,” said Duda.

Bangladesh and Madagascar also replace their ambassadors to Washington

By comparison, the other new ambassadors are not controversial at all.

Asad Alam Siam replaced Muhammad Imran as Bangladesh’s ambassador to the United States in December. Previously, he was Dhaka’s top envoy to Austria as well as permanent representative to various Vienna-based international organizations.

Siam completed his bachelor’s in architecture from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) as well as a master’s in business administration from the Maastricht School of Management in the Netherlands.

He joined the Foreign Service in 1995, serving as chief of protocol and rector of the Foreign Service Academy. He then served as the first consul-general of Bangladesh in Milan, Italy; he has also served as ambassador to the Philippines and Palau, and has served in Bangladesh diplomatic missions in Bangkok, Thailand; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Manchester, England.

With 175 million inhabitants, Bangladesh is the world’s 8th-largest country in population. Excluding microstates and small islands, Bangladesh is also the most densely populated nation, with more than 3,000 people per square mile.

Madagascar, the world’s fourth-largest island and home to 32 million people, also has a new ambassador in Washington: Lantosoa Rakotomalala. His arrival fills a post that had been vacant since the January 2019 departure of the last ambassador, Eric Robson Andriamihaja.

“This long period without diplomatic representation has raised concerns about Madagascar’s visibility and influence on the international stage, particularly in a country as strategic as the United States,” reported the Antanananarivo website Gazety. “This decision marks a significant turning point in Malagasy diplomacy.”

Rakotomalala was previously president of the board of directors of the Economic Development Board of Madagascar, and before that, she was the country’s minister of industry, trade and crafts. As head of EDBM, she played a key role in promoting Madagascar’s economic development, attracting foreign investment and supporting local initiatives.

New ambassadors have also been named from Belgium (Frédéric Bernard); Ethiopia (Andualem Ashene Binalf) and Kyrgyzstan (Aibek Moldogaziev).

New diplomats to represent tiny Andorra, Nauru from New York

Finally, the microstates of Andorra and Nauru also have new ambassadors, but both are based in New York, where they will also serve as permanent representatives to the United Nations.

Joan Forner Rovira represents the mountainous principality of Andorra—about 2.5 times the size of Washington DC and home to about 85,000 people. He holds a master’s degree in science from New York University, and law degrees from the University of Andorra and Spain’s University of Barcelona.

Before this appointment, Rovira was Andorra’s permanent representative to the Council of Europe (2019-24), and ambassador to the UN Office in Geneva (2019-21). Prior to that, he was Andorra’s deputy permanent representative to the Council of Europe (2013-14 and 2015-17), as well as the mission’s chargé d’affaires (2014-15).

Additionally, Rovira has served as director of the Foreign Ministry’s Department of Multilateral Affairs and Cooperation (2019), director of its Department of Bilateral and Consular Affairs (2017-19); legal advisor in its International Conventions Department (2010-13); minister-counselor at Andorra’s embassy in Madrid (2002-07) and at its mission to the UN (1993-2000).

Nauru’s new envoy is Lara Erab Daniel. At only 8 square miles, Nauru—which derives its wealth from phosphate—is the world’s smallest independent island nation.

Daniel attended primary school in Tasmania as well as Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She began her career in 1990 at Nauru’s Department of Education as a teacher’s aide; she also worked as a senior reporter at the Nauru Bulletin and at Nauru’s Fisheries and Marine Resources Authority (1999-2006).

Joining Nauru’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in 2006, she held various positions there and in 2010 was named vice-consul in Brisbane, Australia, second secretary at Nauru’s permanent mission to the UN in New York (2011-15) and executive secretary of the Alliance of Small Island States (2012-14).

Daniel later became administration officer for Nauru Air (2016-20), scholarship manager at Nauru’s Department of Education (2021), and policy analyst in Nauru’s Department of Foreign Affairs (2022-24) before returning to New York now as permanent representative.

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