Tillerson must navigate D.C. first
Friction with Trump further complicates top diplomat’s task
Top diplomat’s task complicated by friction with Trump,
Rex Tillerson wants Americans to sleep well at night, even while a trigger-happy dictator in North Korea and a Twitter-tapping president at the White House threaten nuclear Armageddon.
Tillerson’s task as the nation’s chief diplomat facing his first major international crisis is tougher than promoting sweet dreams. Along with President Trump’s threat of “fire and fury” against North Korea, he must deal with a depleted senior staff, a threatened budget crunch and a power struggle with the White House.
Whether the secretary of State is up to the job — or whether he may even be contemplating a hasty exit, or “Rexit,” from Foggy Bottom — is one of the central questions for Washington’s foreign policy cognoscenti as Tillerson completes his trek through southeast Asia.
“Don’t quit yet!” was the plea last month from Aaron David Miller, a former State Department diplomat in Republican and Democratic administrations. Miller, vice president at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said the White House needs to give Tillerson the flexibility to do his job.
“Trump hasn’t empowered him” over other administration officials, such as United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and White House adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Miller said. The president, he said, “has to literally restrain his own instincts when it comes to doing foreign policy on Twitter and let Tillerson be perceived as the repository of authority.”
That didn’t happen this week, when Tillerson sought to enforce economic sanctions that could lure North Korea to the bargaining table while Trump was threatening “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Rather than part of a coordinated strategy, Trump’s words were improvised on the spot, The New York Times reported.
Nor did it happen last month, when Tillerson sought to mediate between Qatar and four Persian Gulf neighbors led by Saudi Ara- bia, even as Trump took the neighbors’ side and called Qatar “a funder of terrorism at a very high level.”
Tillerson alluded to the cacophony at the time, telling reporters his new job “is a lot different than being CEO of Exxon, because I was the ultimate decision-maker. That always makes life easier.”
Because any military solution to the North Korean nuclear buildup would be catastrophic in terms of loss of life, sanctions and diplomacy represent nearly everyone’s first choice.
But while seeking to beef up the Pentagon, Trump has proposed a 30% cut at the State Department.
“The problem is that this administration, this president and even this secretary of State have downsized their commitment to the State Department,” said Rep. Eliot Engel, ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “It just goes to show what happens when you don’t do diplomacy before you do everything else.”
Tillerson faces several prob- lems navigating Washington, much less North Korea:
As has been the case in past administrations, the State Department is but one policy power center. It competes with the Pentagon, National Security Councilfor the president’s attention. Under Trump, the problem is “multipolar,” Miller said.
“I’ve never, ever seen anything like this,” he said. “Tillerson needs to be in sync with the president, in word and in deed.”
The administration has been slower than its predecessors in filling senior jobs, and the State Department has been among the slowest, in part because of disputes with the White House. Only 24 of 131 jobs requiring Senate confirmation have been filled; most of those are ambassadors to individual countries.
“There just has not been sufficient prioritization in terms of filling these jobs,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service. He said Tillerson’s effort to reorganize the department and cut the budget by 28%, as Trump has proposed, was like trying to “re-engineer the airplane while you’re flying it.”
Tillerson himself, chosen after Trump discarded more experienced prospects such as former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and former Central Intelligence Agency director David Petraeus, came with no government experience from his job at Exxon Mobil.
Yet the State Department pushed back Wednesday against the argument that the administration’s North Korea strategy and rhetoric were discordant. Spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Trump is “on the same page” with both Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon, and that international pressure on Pyongyang “is working.”
“(Trump) has to literally restrain his own instincts ... and let Tillerson be perceived as the repository of authority.”
Aaron David Miller, former State Department diplomat