[mamonster]

>This is how most foreign services are run, with maybe the exception of China.

Absolutely not most. What country in Europe has a significant amount of ambassadors that are not career diplomats / government workers ?

In France, Germany, Switzerland you would either need to be a career diplomat/ foreign service worker or in rare cases you would be a career government employee assigned as diplomat to some specific country for some reason (i.e you were trade minister and become ambassador to your biggest trading partner).

The most "political" appointee ambassador in Europe I can think of is Mandelson but he is (as we found out) supremely connected to US power networks and he is still a lifetime politician/ government employee.

[Tomte]

Former speaker of the chancellor (and TV news anchor before that) is German ambassador to Israel. Next ambassador will be a career politician.

It‘s not uncommon, though I‘d say even the „cool posts“ like Paris or London usually go to career diplomats.

[bondarchuk]

I know nothing about this but JumpCrisscross seems to use "political" to mean "has donated large sums of money" while your use of "political" is more like.. someone who does politics.