World safer if Trump avoids Rexit
Say what you like about Kim Jongun, he has performed one useful service: his rush for a nuclear bomb has kept Rex Tillerson in a job for the past year.
As Donald Trump kicks and needles his secretary of state, as the soldiers in the White House sharpen their sabres, so the talk has turned increasingly to Rexit. He’s weak, say his critics, a businessman out of his depth. Defenestration has been tipped since the autumn.
Yet the biggest and most predictable international crisis of 2018, the disarming of Kim, is going to need top-level diplomacy rather than tweeted bombast.
Not only does Tillerson understand and defend the core mission - to balance the Pentagon’s military planning against Pyongyang by schmoozing both China and Russia - he is actually good for America too.
State Department officials naturally disagree. They see at their helm a man who is enforcing rather than fighting against a 30 per cent cut in the department budget. American foreign policy is being ‘‘redesigned’’. That is, about 100 diplomats have already walked the plank. The purge is about pleasing the president by saving cash, cutting dead wood and, some suspect, wiping out the lingering traces of Hillary Clinton’s stint as secretary of state.
The number of career ambassadorships has fallen by 60 per cent. Steve Bannon, the former Trump guru, promised a revolution, a long march through the institutions. Now he’s gone and US diplomats are among many public servants feeling the effect of the wrecking ball.
Tillerson has a point when he says that the bureaucracy can be shrunk because conflicts once central to US foreign policy are being wound down or put on ice.
Since Washington is quietly dropping its insistence on getting rid of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-assad, and since it doesn’t intend to do much by way of nation-building, then it has spare capacity, a surfeit of Arabists.
If the US hints that the tension on the South China Sea has become a second-order problem for America, if the chief issue with Beijing is trade, then it’s the commerce department and the White House that can pick up the slack. Withdraw from international undertakings such as the Paris climate agreement, downgrade any kind of multilateral diplomacy and you can trim back manpower.
Tillerson presides over this retreat and is accordingly hated at his workplace. He is struggling against a president who has no appetite for the long game.
Apart from managing his department and US global interests, he must manage Trump. No relationship between a president and his secretary of state is without friction. It’s about the balance of competences, the fact that presidents, though decked out with executive power, are usually unschooled in foreign policy.
Tillerson most resembles his fellow Texan James Baker, who wasn’t in the least intimidated by his boss, George Bush senior. Both have been forced to be interpreters. Baker travelled to Geneva to deliver a fairly bland warning from Bush to Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister in 1991.
It told Saddam not to commit ‘‘unconscionable acts’’. Baker thought this was not the moment for ambiguity and told the minister, Tariq Aziz, that if biochemical weapons were used, ‘‘the American people will demand vengeance and we have the means to exact it; that’s not a threat, it’s a promise’’.
Tillerson, of course, does not have to magnify his president’s message. He has to turn Twitterspeak into rational-speak. No more so than in the coming months. He has told the Chinese and America’s two security partners in the region, South Korea and Japan, that the US has a contingency plan: if the Kim regime melts down, the US could send a special forces unit into the North to disarm its nuclear weapons.
Diplomacy is never more essential than when a war starts to unfold. Reason enough not to sack Rex. Not just yet.
The Times