North Korea makes it a dangerous time for Trump to sideline his top diplomat

As bizarre as British politics may feel at the moment, rest assured that your American cousins are, as usual, making an even bigger mess of things. In the midst of critically important negotiations with Iran and North Korea, the biggest diplomatic news of the week was not a breakthrough in either of those talks, but rather speculation about the shelf life of the man representing the American side.

On Wednesday morning, NBC put out a report that Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State, had called the president a “moron” following a meeting on the war in Afghanistan at the Pentagon, and had seriously considered quitting after the president delivered a highly politicised, widely panned speech at a Boy Scout jamboree. By that afternoon, Tillerson was frogmarched in front of cameras to declare that he had never threatened to resign, and that he had not needed any persuading from the vice president to remain in his post.

It was a thoroughly uncomfortable affair with a distinctly Stalinist feel; one imagines that in the coming months, he’ll be shipped off to the gulag and airbrushed out of cabinet photographs.

On the critical point of name-calling (a crime so serious that it routinely brings reprimands for eight-year-olds on the playground), he hemmed and hawed about not stooping to address such pettiness. In Washington, we call that a “non-denial denial”, and it almost always means that the allegation in question is true.

Tillerson enjoying a brief moment of honesty in a private meeting has no impact whatsoever on his job performance – what has had an impact on his job performance is the fact that his boss seems to prefer that he neuter his own department.

In that sense, he has been successful in his post; columns detailing the misery of State Department employees and the mass exodus of talent are published at an evermore rapid pace. Tillerson is the chief diplomat for the world’s great superpower under a president who has little interest in conventional diplomacy. He has had to content himself with managing the decline of one of Washington’s great bureaucracies.

It’s tough to see why he accepted the gig in the first place, except for the fact that it’s not the sort of position which one refuses. There are, of course, platitudes about the honour of serving one’s country and one’s president – many positions in government are only palatable with that afterglow of duty fulfilled.

Secretary of State is not ordinarily one of them. It is not clear how much longer he’ll last (the same NBC report indicated that he was simply hoping to make it one year in the post), but we can safely assume that no State Department conference rooms or scholarships will be renamed for him after his departure.

This latest round of Washington bare-knuckle boxing could not come at a worse time. The crisis on the Korean peninsula continues to intensify, with reports on Friday evening indicating that the regime is planning on testing another long-

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion range missile capable of hitting the American West Coast. No visible progress has been made on rolling back North Korea’s nuclear programme, with Trump’s rhetoric so far doing little to bring an end to Kim Jong-un’s nuclear ambitions.

Trump also announced his intention this week to decertify the Iran nuclear deal signed by his predecessor, turfing the accord back to Congress for review. If the deal is eventually scrapped, America will need all its diplomatic skill and focus to secure an improved replacement.

The good news in this situation is that Trump has so consistently undercut his Secretary of State that his departure will not result in a dramatic or dangerous shift in American foreign policy.

Only days ago, Trump tweeted that his “wonderful” Secretary of State was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man”.

With such rhetoric coming from Tillerson’s boss, it’s unlikely that he’s been able to make much progress in the room, so his jumping or being pushed out of the administration will not cause too much disruption; such are the comforts available to us in these strange times.

Foreign policy cannot be managed into stasis; it cannot be shelved or put on the back-burner for any significant length of time. Our periods of isolationism throughout the 20th century have typically been followed by the necessity for large-scale intervention – the world does not sleep when America does.

With or without Rex Tillerson, this administration needs to wake up to the reality that Americans cannot prosper at home or abroad if their government cannot solve its HR problems.

Is science fiction a good guide to the future? It’s easy to sneer at the doomed prophecies of a thousand bad novels, but researchers at Project Hieroglyph at Arizona State University suggest thinking of the question in a different way. Books and films may be hit and miss at predicting the minutiae of society 100 years from now, but they can be a brilliant means of imagining how innovations might actually be used by humans. Will we trust driverless cars not to crash? Will we fall in love with our robots? Ask a writer, not a scientist.

Seen in this light, Lionel Shriver’s novel The Mandibles, set between 2029 and 2047, should terrify us all. It follows a family through the destruction of the US economy by debt-obsessed politicians into a recovery almost as crippling as the collapse. In its latter stages, what struck me most is technology’s role as both liberator and oppressor. By wearing implants which log income and expenditure, people dispense with the inconvenience of physical cash, but at a terrible cost: what government knows, government can control. With every transaction registered on a computer, no one can escape punishing taxes and penalties on saving. The individual is crushed to save the country from a mess politicians created.

I love contactless payments and internet banking, but I fear for the future. The news last week was that

‘One imagines that in the coming months, Tillerson will be shipped off to the gulag and airbrushed out of cabinet photographs’

‘It’s hardly surprising that among the countries with the greatest attachment to physical cash are those that have suffered the most disastrous economic experiments’

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion