TRUMP MAY MAKE AMERICA MISS REX TILLERSON
If Rex Tillerson had ended his professional career as chief executive officer of ExxonMobil, his reputation would have been that of a successful leader of one of the world’s largest companies and a devoted supporter of the Boy Scouts.
Instead he will be remembered as one of the country’s weakest and least effective secretaries of state. With no experience in foreign policy or government, he provided little leadership and eviscerated the department he was chosen to lead, enthusiastically carrying out the budget-cutting orders of a hot-headed president uninterested in diplomacy. Scores of senior diplomats and other professionals, the core of America’s foreign service, either were forced out or chose to flee.
And yet we have cause to regret his departure, because his replacement is likely to be worse.
Tillerson was at least one of the administration’s few realist voices, along with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. He acknowledged threats from Russia, advocated diplomacy with North Korea, supported the Paris climate pact and encouraged Trump to preserve the Iran nuclear deal. But that frequently put him at odds with Trump.
The relationship was further eroded when it was reported that last summer he called the president a “moron” at a gathering of national security and Cabinet officials and, after Trump spoke respectfully of white nationalists who demonstrated in Charlottesville, Va., Tillerson said Trump “speaks for himself.”
So the president announced he would replace Tillerson with Mike Pompeo, the CIA director and former Tea Party congressman. Pompeo has endeared himself to the climate-denying Koch brothers, who, along with their family, employees and affiliated groups, donated $357,300 to his campaigns and political action committee, according to the McClatchy newspapers. Pompeo is unlikely to be sidelined in major policy debates, as Tillerson was regularly, even though he too, unlike Trump, supported his agency’s conclusion that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 elections.
But his hawkish approach could do serious damage on major national security issues, including Iran and North Korea, on which he has expressed views at odds with his predecessor’s.
The timing of Tillerson’s ouster most likely hinges on the fact that Trump is facing his biggest foreign policy gamble, a decision to hold direct negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, starting with face-to-face talks with the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, supposedly in May. Tough trade talks are also looming.
Pompeo will face other challenges in managing an increasingly aggressive China, as well as dealing with Europe and Afghanistan and turmoil in Syria and other parts of the Middle East.
To replace Pompeo, the president chose Gina Haspel, deputy director of the CIA, to become the first woman to head the agency.
Few U.S. officials have been so directly involved in the post-Sept. 11 frenzy of torture that began under President George W. Bush and was ended by President Barack Obama. As an undercover CIA officer, Haspel played a direct role in the agency’s “extraordinary rendition program,” under which captured extremists were remanded to foreign governments and held at secret sites where they were tortured by agency personnel. She also was associated with videotaped recordings of torture that were later destroyed.
Some members of Congress had opposed her promotion in the past and would be wise to carefully reconsider her background when her nomination, and that of Pompeo, go before the Senate for confirmation.
Meanwhile, we are left once again to contemplate the chaos of the Trump White House.
The New York Times