Embassies: Archaic, Dangerous, Expensive

According to a recent news report, our two-century diplomatic presence amid the gardens and trees of prestigious Grosvenor Square in historic, central London, England, is to end.
According to Ambassador Tuttle, we need a modern, secure, sustainable embassy that can only be provided by creating a new facility, some distance away from the city, where, presumably, one of the State Department's ugly, threatening, castle fortresses will be built on a remote 5-acre site. The current embassy's 600-room mansion will, most likely, become a tony hotel.
As I thought about that news item, it came to me that it would be an excellent idea to turn all of our embassies into hotels -without replacing any of them. Neither the physical facilities nor their ambassadors now serve any useful purpose. But the palace-like buildings and their occupants are attractive targets for terrorists, and the cost of their upkeep is in the billions of dollars, which we could use to pay off mortgages for irresponsible, spendthrift borrowers here at home.
During the past 30 years, our State Department has been gradually swapping out graceful old buildings that traditionally housed our embassies, replacing them with ugly, looming, modern fortresses, which are more suggestive of the presence of an occupying force than a friendly neighbor. The first such I saw was in Ankara, Turkey, where heavily armored cars whisked embassy employees through massive iron gates leading into a foreboding-looking gray fort, complete even with long vertical slits for windows. Incidentally, the classic original embassy (located in historic Istanbul) was converted into a consulate, which was recently targeted by terrorists, but was, thankfully, not much damaged, thanks to effective Turkish security.
The erection of these "crusader forts" in other's nations is an insulting declaration that we have little faith in the host to provide expected security. Those ugly monuments to "American imperialism" are provocative and tempting targets for terrorists. They are unnecessary, because the only physical presence our State Department needs in any other nation is a consulate staffed by from three to 12 persons, which could be safely housed in the upper stories of a run-of-the-mill office building. Ambassadors and their large staffs are absolutely unnecessary, because the State Department, in Washington, has immediate reliable contact with the consulates, as well as with all foreign governments and their representatives. Do you recall the famous "red phones" which were direct links between our presidents and the leaders of the Soviet Union, during the Cold War? Those devices obviously bypassed ambassadors from both nations, who didn't know what their bosses were discussing until after the fact - if even then. Clearly, those ambassadors were excess baggage, even back then in the 1960s.
Back in the day of sailing ships - which were invented, I think, by either Al Gore or Joe Biden - the nearly total lack of rapid communications between Europe and the one-time colonies made it necessary to post a U.S representative permanently in capitals such as Paris and London. Brilliant men, such as Benjamin Franklin were selected for those extraordinarily responsible positions, in which they actually functioned as our president's spokesman. Because mail took months to cross the ocean, men such as Franklin had to use their great knowledge, wit and cunning to respond to queries or requests from local government officials and rulers.
Beginning with the invention of radio, the development of Morse code and, eventually the laying of a communications cable across the Atlantic Ocean, our diplomatic representatives (especially the ambassadors themselves) did less and less without explicit direction/permission from Washington and, thus, became increasingly less necessary. By no later than 1970, secure, reliable, rapid communications made ambassadors, along with their palatial embassies and luxurious residences, unnecessary, obsolete and archaic - but we kept them for a variety of selfish, political reasons (especially as rewards handed out by presidents to friends and generous contributors to political campaigns).
All too often the men (and now women) rewarded by appointment as ambassador to wherever have, at best, precious little particular competence for the work - such as it is. Sometimes, such as in the case of William Saxbe, who was appointed to New Delhi in spite of a widely recognized abrasive personality and no significant knowledge of India, those appointments created sad examples of the fictional "Ugly American" and actually damaged relations between nations.
The rumors around the Beltway had it that Saxbe was "exiled" to India, because, as attorney general in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he'd become intolerable, but couldn't (for rumored political reasons) simply be fired - so he was allowed to resign and then "rewarded" with an ambassadorship, which would get him far away from Washington, while allowing him to live like some sort of wealthy rajah. One of his first acts was to demand that the Air Force assign him an aviator as Air Attaché, apparently hoping that if he had the driver, they might also provide him with the "bus." There was no military aircraft furnished to the embassy in India - not then, nor subsequently - but the ambassador in Paris had one, so Saxbe apparently thought he similarly deserved one.
In 1979, Iranian "students" broke through security of our embassy in Teheran and took captive 52 of our citizens, which they held for 444 days. Nineteen years later, terrorists staged simultaneous attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Hundreds died; thousands more were injured. A day after the audacious bombing of the World Trade Center, terrorists mounted an attack on our embassy in Damascus, Syria; fortunately, the explosive-laden truck never got into position and no U.S. personnel were injured.
However, these attacks will continue, because our embassies are perfect targets of opportunity. Fortifying them is not an answer. Closing the embassies and bringing home the ambassadors and their bloated staffs is. They no longer serve any useful purpose.
Let's start with England, where any current-day ambassador is at least as useless as any I can think of. Cancel plans for that new embassy; close the old one and open a small consulate (to renew passports, etc.) in some unobtrusive rental office over a department store. Think of what we could do with the billions saved every year - like buy ourselves a couple of congressmen, who'd vote as we told them.