Science has sides? That's news to me

[hazard]

It's a good thing that ambassadorial appointments to long time and close allies are well understood to be political appointments picked for, well, internal political reasons, rather than actual skill or desire to cooperate with foreign powers. I mean, Canada did have a run with a climate change denying president for something like 8 years (and did tremendous damage to its scientific establishment between the loss of data points, data storage and just plain scientists no longer being funded and thus looking for different jobs), but it didn't even take months for the new (current) government to reverse all those policy changes once it got into power.