yabiladi
MOHAMMED JAABOUK
LATIFA BABAS
Nominated twice by President Donald Trump, the United States ambassador to Morocco David Fischer is still waiting for the Senate’s go-ahead to assume office. This delay makes the Kingdom the only Maghreb country that has not seen its US ambassador’s nomination confirmed.
For two long years, the United States’ ambassador to Morocco David T. Fischer has been waiting for his nomination to be confirmed by the Senate to join office in Rabat. Nominated twice by President Donald Trump, the American businessman tops the list of US ambassadors who have been waiting to get confirmed to take office.
In July, Fischer ranked second in a list made by the Washington Examiner, featuring massive delays in appointing ambassadors. At the time, Doug Manchester, nominee to become the envoy to the Bahamas, topped the list for waiting more than 700 days for his nomination to get confirmed. Both Fischer and Manchester were donors to Donald Trump’s election campaign in 2016.
The only Maghreb country without a US ambassador
However, Manchester lost his place to Fischer after “the White House formally announced the withdrawal of the nomination of the American billionaire as the U.S. ambassador for the Bahamas”, wrote Eyewitness News on Friday.
The Manchester Financial Group revealed that that «the withdrawal of the nomination for Manchester was due to the threats on his and his family’s lives including three infant children under four years old».
In the Maghreb region, the news make Morocco the only country that has not seen its US ambassador assume office since the departure of Dwight Bush in January 2017.
In Algeria, John P. Desrocher has fully assumed office on the 5th of September 2017. He is one of the first diplomats appointed by the Trump administration. The same thing goes for Mauritania. Michael Dodman has joined the American diplomatic mission in Nouakchott in January 2018 while in Tunisia; Donald Armin Blome took office in February 2019.
Even Libya, a country deemed unstable and where Ambassador John Christopher Stevens was killed in 2012 during an armed attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, has an American ambassador. Richard Norland, appointed in April 2019 by President Trump, arrived in Tripoli in June.
On November 21, 2017, the White House had announced in a communiqué that President Donald Trump nominated American businessman David T. Fischer to be the next US ambassador to Morocco.
