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To answer your question, we went straight to the web site of the U.S. State Department. We figured they ought to know who has an embassy in the country and who doesn't. We compared several different lists on the State Department's site, conferring with another site, and did some math to discover that the answer depends on how you count. Either 176, 177, or 179 independent countries have an embassy or consulate in the U.S. We began with the State Department's list of foreign embassies in the U.S. The list only includes embassies that have web sites so it isn't complete. In addition, it lists web sites for several countries that do not have their own embassies or consulates in the United States. But the
page did lead to a complete list of the 192 independent states of the world. That page lists each sovereign country, including the U.S., and notes which ones have diplomatic relations with the U.S. Of the 191 foreign countries in the world, only 5 -- Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea -- do not have relations with the United States. That put our count at 186 (191 - 5) countries with embassies or consulates in the U.S. Next, we cross-referenced the information from the first two lists with the State Department's diplomatic list. That list offers the addresses of foreign embassies, along with the names and titles of the embassy staffs. That's where we looked for
countries that didn't have a web site on the first list but do have diplomatic relations with the U.S. According to these lists, the following 12 nations do not have an embassy in the U.S.: East Timor, Kiribati, Libya, Maldives, Monaco, Nauru, San Marino, the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe (simply called Sao Tome and Principe for short), Somalia, Tajikistan, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. This number is in addition to the countries that have no diplomatic relations at all with the U.S., so our total was now 174 (186 - 12). For confirmation, we did a few more searches and found an excellent resource in Embassy World, which lists a huge number of world embassies. There we learned that Monaco and San Marino do have consulates
inside the U.S, so our running tally was at 176 (174 + 2). The Pacific Island nation of Nauru has a consulate in the U.S. territory of Guam, so if you consider Guam part of the U.S., you can add 1 to the list for a total of 177 countries. Sao Tome and Principe has honorary consulates in Atlanta and Chicago, and Kiribati has an honorary consulate in Honolulu. If you include honorary consulates, our total comes to 179 countries. To further complicate matters, some countries have no embassy or consulate in the U.S. but do have missions to the United Nations that may serve as representation. How's that for a convoluted mathematical answer to your question?
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