Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s
State Dept. denies ‘unprecedented’ absence a show of priority
decision to skip a NATO summit meeting and instead travel to Russia is raising questions.
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s decision to skip a NATO meeting in Europe next month and later travel to Russia has raised fresh questions about the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities.
State Department officials said Tuesday that Tillerson will not attend a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting of foreign ministers April 5-6 in Brussels so that he could take part in Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping on April 6-7 in Palm Beach, Fla.
Partly to help make diplomatic preparations for Xi’s first meeting with Trump, Tillerson met the Chinese leader in Beijing last week on the final leg of a trip that also took him to Seoul and Tokyo.
Tillerson’s media adviser, R.C. Hammond, said on Twitter that Tillerson would see most of the NATO foreign ministers in Washington this week at an unrelated diplomatic conference that will focus on efforts to defeat Islamic State.
Hammond said Tillerson also would attend a ministerial meeting of the Group of 7 bloc of industrialized democracies April 10-11 in Italy en route to Moscow. The G-7 includes some NATO allies as well as Japan.
Still, critics argued that Tillerson shouldn’t skip the Brussels meeting because it will lay the foundation for a NATO leaders summit in late April that Trump has said he would attend.
The message, according to former U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder, is “China and Russia are more important to us than our most important democratic allies, with whom we have stood shoulder to shoulder since 1949,” when the NATO treaty was signed.
“It is quite remarkable and unprecedented,” said Daalder, now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Mark Toner, the State Department spokesman, said U.S. and NATO officials had exchanged potential alternative dates for the Brussels meeting but could not find another time when all the ministers could attend.
Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called Tillerson’s decision to skip the NATO meeting a “grave error” that will “shake the confidence of America’s most important alliance.”
“I cannot fathom why the Administration would pursue this course except to signal a change in American foreign policy that draws our country away from Western democracy’s most important institutions and aligns the United States more closely with the autocratic regime in the Kremlin,” Engel said in a statement.
Toner said missing the NATO ministerial meeting “absolutely” did not signal diminished regard for the alliance, and that Thomas Shannon, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, would represent the United States.
“We are 100 percent committed to NATO,” Toner said Tuesday.
The White House has offered conflicting signals about its support for NATO and its overtures to Moscow.
Trump called NATO “obsolete” before he took office but he has since embraced the 28-member military alliance. He reiterated “strong support” for NATO during a news conference Friday with visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but again demanded that Germany and other member states boost their defense budgets.
Trump repeatedly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin before he took office. He has barely mentioned the Russian leader since then, however, and there are no signs of enhanced diplomatic or military cooperation with Moscow.
Doing so now might be politically risky.
The FBI director, James Comey, told the House Intelligence Committee on Monday that the bureau is investigating whether Trump’s aides colluded with Russian authorities during the 2016 campaign, a potential crime. U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Putin approved meddling in the race partly in an effort to help Trump.
During the hearing, Democrats outlined a web of circumstantial links between Russian authorities and members of Trump’s current and former inner circle. Tillerson was among those they criticized.