Tillerson jabs at Russia over chemical attack

Hard line precedes first Moscow visit as secretary of state.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is taking a hard line against Russia on the eve of his first diplomatic trip to Moscow, calling the country “incompetent” for allowing Syria to hold on to chemical weapons and accusing Russia of trying to influence elections in Europe using the same methods it employed in the United States.

Tillerson’s comments, made in interviews aired Sunday, were far more critical of the Russian government than any public statements by President Donald Trump, who has been an increasingly lonely voice for getting along better with Russia. They seemed to reflect Tillerson’s expectation, which he has expressed privately to aides and members of Congress, that the U.S. relationship with Russia is already reverting to the norm: one of friction, distrust and mutual efforts to undermine each other’s reach.

“This was inevitable,” said Philip H. Gordon, a former Middle East coordinator at the National Security Council who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Trump’s early let’s-be-friends initiative was incompatible with our interests, and you knew it would end with tears.” The Russians’ behavior has not changed, Gordon added, and they “are using every means they can — cyber, economic arrangements, intimidation — to reinsert themselves around the Middle East and Europe.”

Yet as Tillerson arrived in Italy to meet with foreign ministers before making the first visit to Moscow by a top Trump administration official, the administration was sending conflicting signals about U.S. policy on Syria and the future of relations with its patron Russia.

Tillerson said explicitly that the U.S. attack last week on a Syrian air base was intended solely to halt future chemical attacks, and not to destabilize or overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad. Instead, he said that defeating the Islamic State remained the first priority. Only then, he said, would he turn to a cease-fire process leading to elections, so that “the Syrian people can decide the fate of Assad.”

But the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, suggested that such a process was doomed as long as Assad was in power. “We know there’s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime,” she said on CNN.

That statement stood in contrast not only to Tillerson’s comments but also to her own remarks a week ago — before Assad carried out his latest chemical weapons attack on civilians — in which she insisted that his departure from office was not a diplomatic priority for the United States.

Trump’s national security adviser on Sunday left open the possibility of additional U.S. military action against Syria but indicated that the United States was not seeking to act unilaterally to oust Assad.