Four categories on one list

The five posts are not the same kind of thing. The State Department told Congress it would close the US embassy in Grenada, the consulates in Nagoya and Medan, the American Presence Post in Winnipeg and an embassy branch office in Douala. An embassy is accredited to a state. A consulate administers a consular district. A presence post and a branch office are extensions of a mission that continues to exist elsewhere in the same country. Of the five, one is an embassy.[1]

The instrument is a notice, not a statute. In separate letters sent to lawmakers late last week and obtained by AP News, the department stated an intention. That is the whole legal weight the reporting establishes: an announced intention, a set of five names and a figure attached to them.[1]

The figure is about 4.4 million dollars a year, and AP notes that the missions employ very few people compared with others. A saving that small is a weak explanation for a decision that changes where the United States keeps a permanent address. The more restrained reading is administrative consolidation whose selection criteria have not been published; a uniform cost programme applied to the smallest posts would look identical from outside, and nothing in the notices distinguishes the two.[1]

Doors opening in the same period

The same administration is pressing ahead with plans to reopen shuttered posts in Libya and Syria, and it has already reopened the long-closed embassy in Venezuela. Placed beside the five closures, the change reads as a redistribution of where the United States is formally present rather than a withdrawal measured in dollars.[1]

That redistribution has a direction the cost figure cannot express. Grenada, Winnipeg, Nagoya, Medan and Douala are being subtracted; Tripoli, Damascus and Caracas are being added or restored. Each of the three additions sits in a country where a permanent American address had been absent or interrupted, which is a different kind of asset from a consulate in a large allied economy.[1]

What the notice cannot settle is what follows it. The reporting records that Congress was informed and what the department intends; it records no congressional response, condition or review step. Until one appears, the operative question is procedural rather than strategic: whether a notification of this kind is the end of the process or the opening of one.[1]