Adults in White House need to step up
Be prepared! As an Eagle Scout, Rex Tillerson should have embraced the movement’s motto and readied himself for a bumpy ride when he signed up as Donald Trump’s secretary of state. Things have come to a pretty pass when America’s chief steward of foreign policy refuses to deny that he called the president a ‘‘f...ing moron’’, and when Trump himself publicly smacks down Tillerson on the war-and-peace issue of North Korea.
The centralisation of power in the White House did not begin with Trump, nor is there anything exceptional about a US president feuding with his foreign policy chief.
What is happening to Tillerson, however, is special. His fate will determine whether Trump’s experiment in anti-establishment rule is doomed or whether it will fundamentally reshape US presidential power. The row over North Korea started when Tillerson admitted to reporters there were backchannels open to Kim Jong Un’s regime. The president tweeted soon afterwards that talks were senseless. Where does that leave the Asian allies of the US, China, Kim or a nervous world?
When he isn’t contradicting Tillerson, Trump is scratching away at his authority. The president’s son-inlaw, Jared Kushner, has been given the task of finding peace in the Middle East, usually the preserve of a secretary of state. China policy is being shaped by hardliners in the White House. Russia, despite Tillerson having been awarded an Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin, is off the serious policy agenda as long as the Trump administration is under such intense scrutiny for alleged collusion with the Kremlin.
Despite all this, Tillerson’s beef with Trump does not seem to be about policy so much as tone. Tillerson agrees with the White House’s hostile assessment of Iran. And he has pleased the president with cutbacks to the top-heavy bureaucracy of the State Department, which boasts 66 ‘‘special envoys’’.
Clinton loyalists are being purged. Deep cuts in foreign aid are on the agenda; so is a staged withdrawal from multinational forums on the environment or human rights.
The rupture is rather about the Boy Scouts, or at least respect for the institutions that set the pace of everyday American life. Tillerson, a former national chief of the scouting movement, was incandescent when the president made a speech to the annual jamboree that instead of talking about American values laid into Trump’s political enemies. That almost certainly prompted Tillerson’s ‘‘moron’’ comment. Before lunching with Tillerson and Jim Mattis, the defence secretary on Tuesday, the president said he would be ready to face an IQ test showdown with Tillerson to establish that he was not a moron. The juvenile response drew a collective cringe from the foreign policy community.
The Boy Scout incident matters because it’s how Tillerson was drawn into the White House in the first place. Robert Gates, who used to sit with Tillerson on the board of Boy Scouts of America, recommended him to Trump. As a defence secretary to Bush and Obama, Gates had developed a keen eye for conservative businessmen with political savvy. Tillerson postponed his planned retirement from the Exxon oil group and headed to Washington to join the generals in the White House.
Veteran observers recall the classic Cold War movie Seven Days in May, in which a wise president intent on making peace with the Soviet Union faces a coup mounted by Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. Now the plot has changed, they say: it is the generals plus Rex who are trying to calm down a trigger-happy commander-in-chief.
That patronises Trump. Bob Corker, the Republican senator, ploughed a similar groove this week by describing the likes of Mattis, Tillerson and chief of staff John Kelly as the ‘‘adult daycare centre’’ of the White House. In fact there is a deeper bond between these men: a shared contempt for what they saw as the decadence of the Obama years, the ducking of responsibility, the blurring of red lines. They are suspicious, like their boss, of Washington’s backscratching deals. Tillerson’s commitment to Scouts’ values of selfsufficiency is mirrored by Mattis’s devotion to the Marine Corps’ sense of duty.
It was always going to be a stretch to see Trump, with his real estate, casinos and loose tongue, as the champion of American traditionalism. But the ‘‘adults’’ do understand they have a moral obligation to resolve America’s strategic predicament rather than bolting out of the door. The alternative: the White House bumps along from crisis to crisis until the political capital of the US is exhausted.
That means framing choices. Even the modest increase in US troop presence planned for Afghanistan will end up costing America $US40 billion over five years. The president has to understand that this further investment will not buy him victory; the best that can be achieved is not to lose. Moreover, the president has to be guided on when a crisis should be left alone, advised when intervention helps and when it risks making matters worse.
All this requires calm and thoughtful counsel. Unlike his predecessors, Tillerson has not delivered a set-piece speech on US foreign policy goals. He should do so, explain that a return to traditional American values is compatible with engaging with the outside world. Since Trump has so far been unable to find the appropriate words, it is up to Tillerson. That’s his duty.