The Caribbean island nation of about 400,000 people has been without a top American diplomat since November 2011. Absent a U.S. ambassador, there have been eight chargés d’affaires, people who hold a top U.S. embassy post when no ambassador is in place.

Diplomatic relief may finally be coming in the form of Herschel Walker, President Donald Trump’s pick to be U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas, assuming the college football legend can win confirmation in the Republican-majority Senate.

Confirmation for the nomination of Walker, who lost a 2022 Georgia Senate bid in one of that cycle’s most bruising campaigns, would end one of the strangest diplomatic sagas in recent memory. It’s a seemingly plum ambassadorship that has been open so long due in part to bare-knuckle political tactics by Democratic and Republican senators toward nominees put forward by presidents of the other party, and also by the ambassadorial post’s relatively low priority compared to vacancies in global hot spots such as Ukraine, after Russia’s February 2022 invasion, and Yemen, where terrorist acts by Houthi rebels are disrupting global shipping.

Not that the U.S. ambassadorship to the Bahamas, or any nation, is unimportant. The archipelago nation of more than 3,000 islands is a popular U.S. tourist destination. The capital of Nassau is only a 45-minute plane ride from Miami or Fort Lauderdale or a two-hour ferry ride from those sunny South Florida locales.

The nations have traditionally had close economic and commercial ties, with a $7.3 billion annual trade relationship, according to the State Department. The countries have also long cooperated in reducing crime and addressing illegal migration because the Bahamas, which gained independence from Great Britain in 1973, has often been used as a gateway for drugs and illegal aliens bound for the U.S.

Those are just the kinds of issues that, without a U.S. ambassador, can put a strain on the countries’ relationship, said Ronald E. Neumann, a retired Foreign Service officer who is now president of the Washington-based American Academy of Diplomacy.

“Countries tend to regard a real ambassador as being more worthy to talk to,” Neumann said in an interview. “The ambassador is the president’s representative. It has very much become a sign of disrespect when you don’t have one.”

Added Neumann, who was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, Bahrain from 2001 to 2004, and Algeria from 1994 to 1997, “Chargés have more trouble getting in for meetings.”

A political ambassadorship long unfilled

The U.S. ambassadorship to the Bahamas has long been filled by political players in both parties. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush appointed and the Senate confirmed former Sen. Chic Hecht, a Nevada Republican who had just lost his reelection bid after a single six-year term.

Hecht’s successor as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas, picked by former President Bill Clinton, was former NFL linebacker-turned-businessman Sidney Williams, the husband of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA).

Successive U.S. ambassadors, named by presidents of both parties, were a combination of big campaign contributors and politically connected kin of the elite, such as Nicole Avant, the ambassador from October 2009 to November 2011, during former President Barack Obama’s first term. Her late father, Clarence Avant, was a prominent music executive, at one point chairman of Motown Records, and film producer.

Avant’s departure from Nassau kicked off the long ambassadorial vacancy still in place, with political disputes as a prime cause.

The Obama administration, with other pressing diplomatic matters, at first relied on career diplomats to head the American embassy in Nassau. On Feb. 7, 2014, Obama nominated Cassandra Butts, his onetime Harvard Law School classmate and later a longtime senior adviser on Capitol Hill to Democratic lawmakers. The Senate held a committee hearing on her nomination in May 2014, but no action was taken the rest of the year. Butts’s nomination lapsed with the end of the 113^th Congress, when Republicans took the Senate majority after their rousing midterm election wins in the 2014 midterm elections.

Obama nominated Butts again on Feb. 15, 2015, but Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) placed a hold on the nomination. Soon after, though, Butts grew ill and died of leukemia on May 25, 2016.

After Trump won the presidency in 2016, he nominated as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas a wealthy San Diego businessman who had been a major campaign contributor, Doug Manchester. However, that nomination stalled amid a series of negative headlines about Manchester, including allegations that he had exchanged money for political favors. The first Trump administration withdrew the pick in November 2019.

In May 2020, Trump nominated William A. Douglass, a Florida-based investor with investments in the Bahamas, but the Senate didn’t act, and after Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, the Democratic president had his own ideas for the position. Biden, on May 22, 2022, nominated Calvin Smyre, a state House member in Georgia and the longest-tenured member of the Peach State’s legislature. But the Smyre nomination never went anywhere, and Trump, as president-elect in 2024, announced his choice of Walker as ambassador.

Walker nomination on deck, maybe

Because the Bahamas ambassadorship traditionally goes to a political player, Walker fits the mold well. He’s a legendary University of Georgia running back who then had a solid NFL career. He was last seen on the national stage in his narrow 2022 loss to Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), who won a full Senate term that year after coming out on top in a 2020 special election.

Walker and Trump go way back, challenging the NFL with the upstart but ultimately doomed USFL in the mid-1980s. Trump recruited Walker to the team he owned, the New Jersey Generals.

So, Trump, decades later, while in political exile of sorts between his two nonconsecutive presidential terms, urged Walker to run for the Georgia Senate seat and effectively cleared the Republican primary field of first-tier competitors. That set “up a battle royale between two Black candidates in the Deep South,” in the words of the 2024 Almanac of American Politics.

“But there were lingering concerns about the former Heisman Trophy winner, who had been living in Texas after playing for the Dallas Cowboys instead of his native Georgia for years,” the Almanac added. Moreover, “Walker had a history of domestic violence, which he ascribed to his mental health struggles as he was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder.”

On the campaign trail, Walker faced waves of negative headlines but still came close to winning. Warnock finished first in November 2022 with 49.4% of the vote, to 48.4% for Walker, just shy of a majority and forcing a runoff. In the Dec. 6, 2022, election, Warnock beat Walker 51.4%-48.6%.

Walker largely faded from public view until Trump, as president-elect after his 2024 win over Democratic rival Kamala Harris, said he would soon nominate the former football star as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas.

The next step for Walker is the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a chamber where Republicans have a 53-47 majority. Yet no hearing is scheduled for Walker, which raises the prospect of the Bahamas ambassadorship going unfilled for even longer.

“You’re in a state of limbo when you don’t have an ambassador. The embassy team would work on short-term strategies, but in anticipation that an ambassador could arrive in the next few months, you would not make big decisions,” recalled former U.S. diplomat Brett Bruen, who is now president of the Global Situation Room, a consulting firm.

“You’re just trying to keep the lights on and relations on autopilot until a new chief of mission shows up,” said Bruen, whose U.S. embassy service included Madagascar, said in an interview. “The absence of ambassadors can be really debilitating.”

In the case of the Bahamas ambassadorship, Walker’s close ties to Trump would seem to put him on the fast track for confirmation. However, it might not be so simple, as Walker attracted so many negative headlines during his 2022 Senate run, including his brandishing of an honorary sheriff’s badge during a debate with Warnock. Walker was responding to Warnock’s accusations that he had misrepresented himself as a law enforcement officer and had previously threatened to commit acts of violence.

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And while Republicans hold a firm Senate majority, Democratic lawmakers are under pressure from a left-wing “resistance” base to block Trump appointees. A Democratic senator could, at the least, drag out the nomination for a while and force Republicans to spend precious Senate floor time trying to advance it.

So, in the Bahamas, a rare, endangered set of whales may get another spotting or two before the next Senate-confirmed U.S. ambassador shows up.