Texan can be tough, tactful
Hutchison is right pick to be Trump’s envoy to NATO, supporters say
WASHINGTON — Stepping into an increasingly complex relationship between President Donald Trump and U.S. allies in Europe, Kay Bailey Hutchison might be expected to soothe a few nerves.
Returning to the national stage as Trump’s pick for ambassador to NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the former Texas Longhorn cheerleader and Houston television reporter comes with foreign policy chops developed over 20 years in the U.S. Senate, mostly in national security and military affairs posts that took her to conflicts around the globe.
Where Trump once questioned the alliance’s relevance and demanded that Western European allies spend more on their common defense, Hutchison has praised it as “our most important security alliance.”
Theirs, Republican analysts say, is more of a difference of style than substance.
Known for a genuine, warm presence in the Senate, Hutchison also is described by close associates as a tireless and tenacious advocate. “She’s an iron fist in a velvet glove,” said former Hutchison staffer David Beckwith, a retired GOP strategist in Austin.
“She’s relentless, and therefore she’s effective,” said former Texas U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, who served with her in her early years in Washington in the 1990s.
Close observers also say a certain delicacy will be needed.
Senate confirmation is all but assured later this month. But Hutchison, 73, will be serving a president
who has come under international scrutiny over his avowed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has challenged NATO interests from Ukraine to Syria.
“It comes at a very tricky time,” said Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak, a former Hutchison press aide. “In terms of Russia’s aggression and interest in undermining NATO, it’s a bit of a delicate job.”
As a candidate, Trump called NATO “obsolete.” As president, he has challenged member nations to meet commitments to spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense.
Trump since has backed off his assertion about NATO obsolescence, but he raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic in May when he gave a speech in Europe that failed to include an expected endorsement of NATO’s Article 5 commitment to a common defense.
Some observers interpreted that as a weakening of U.S. commitment to the 29-nation military alliance. But Trump explicitly endorsed Article 5 in early June. Among those showing signs of relief was Hutchison, who praised Trump on Twitter the next day: “Article 5 holds together the greatest military alliance in the history of the world! @potus right to reaffirm @NATO commitment!”
Baker endorsed
The turnaround did little to reassure Trump critics on foreign policy.
“The flip-flop, from deliberate omission to eventual endorsement, reinforces the perception that Trump does not actually have deep-seated beliefs about these things and that he does not understand the implications of his own words,” said former CIA analyst Paul Miller, associate director of the Clements Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Miller was one of 122 Republican foreign policy experts who signed an open letter opposing Trump in last year’s GOP presidential primaries. This week, he expressed some optimism in Hutchison’s selection as a NATO emissary.
“I hope Hutchison and the other public servants in government assure our allies that the U.S. is bigger than one office, and counsel them not to view Trump as representative of the country as a whole.”
She also comes with the endorsement of James Baker III, secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, who presided over the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
“She’s always had a sharp mind, political savvy and a strong work ethic,” Baker told the Chronicle. “She is an excellent choice.”
The White House declined to make Hutchison available for an interview for this story.
While Hutchison hails from the old establishment wing of the Republican Party — the side that had strong reservations about Trump’s candidacy — those closest to her see the makings of an effective partnership with Trump.
“She’s been in government, and she’s not new to how things work on the world stage,” said longtime friend Jeanne Phillips, who served as President George W. Bush’s U.S. permanent representative to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a position that comes with the rank of ambassador.
“She will be a smart and fair messenger for both points of view, leading to better understanding,” said Phillips, now a top executive for Hunt Consolidated. “She understands the NATO side, and that’s going to be helpful to the administration to have an experienced person there. And she will also understand the president’s views, and that will be helpful to NATO.”
Some see little difference between Trump’s complaint about NATO countries’ defense spending and what past U.S. administrations have said, albeit far less loudly.
Hutchison, as a member of Senate committees on armed services, intelligence and defense appropriations, was no stranger to the bipartisan U.S. call for a bigger European contribution to the alliance.
“She was always somebody who was very cognizant of what the allies were contributing,” said David Davis, who served as a military aide and chief of staff to Hutchison. “She always has been adamant that everyone in the alliance needs to pay their fair share, and that it needs to remain a strong military alliance, not a political alliance, not a social club, but a militarily-capable alliance.”
While fully committed to NATO, Hutchison also used her perch in the Senate to press the Pentagon on whether it would be more cost-effective to bring some military training and deployment functions back home, possibly even to Texas.
Dealing with Trump
Hutchison earned a reputation as a tough but practical negotiator in the Senate, working both sides of the aisle.
“She is a consummate team player,” Gramm said. “She knows how to get things done by dealing with people. Those are exactly the skills that will be required.”
She made few enemies in the Senate, a testament to a measured tone even on some of the most hotbutton issues of the day. In Texas, social conservatives faulted her for a mixed record on abortion rights, an issue that then-Gov. Rick Perry — now Trump’s energy secretary — used against her in a bitter 2010 gubernatorial primary fight.
Perry and Hutchison, now widowed and practicing law at Bracewell LLP, are believed to have patched things up. Political observers, however, will be watching to see how Hutchison, the most senior female Republican senator by the end of her Senate tenure in 2012, will navigate the brash side of Trump.
In an MSNBC interview in April last year, Hutchison said Trump was wrong to attack Hillary Clinton on gender and needed to stay more focused on issues and experience.
“The context that he’s using, personal attacks on his opponents, both Republicans as well as Democrats, is just the wrong attack right now,” Hutchison said. “It is time for him to start talking substance, and I thought his foreign policy speech was a step in the right direction. And I think we don’t need any more of these personal, little slights.”
Hutchison, an early backer of Jeb Bush for president, also said at the time that she wasn’t sure if she could come to support Trump.
She eventually came around, as did much of the GOP establishment, which came to see Trump — running as a populist outsider intent on “draining the swamp” in Washington — as more conducive to Republican domestic and foreign policy goals.
Friends with Tillerson
Hutchison’s selection as NATO ambassador in many ways is seen as a gesture of goodwill toward a skeptical establishment that questioned Trump’s campaign pivots from foreign policy adventurism and isolationism.
It also is seen as a gesture to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil chief who is known to have battled White House staffers for control over State Department and diplomatic posts.
Texas U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said Tillerson and Hutchison have maintained a close friendship in Texas that will play into their partnership on foreign policy. “I think that’s why she got picked for this assignment,” he said.
“Tillerson wants to put his own people in the State Department,” McCaul said, noting that Trump nixed Tillerson’s first pick for the No. 2 job at the State Department, Elliott Abrams, who had served Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush but had questioned Trump’s fitness to be president.
Hutchison, who helped Tillerson prepare for his nomination hearings, will not be the first foreign policy hand to come from outside the Trump camp. She follows former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who supported Sen. Marco Rubio in the GOP presidential primaries. Haley is now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Like Haley, Hutchison will be expected to translate the president’s more unguarded pronouncements into the language of diplomacy, which may mean delivering messages with more persuasion than bluster.
“She will have to be the diplomatic enforcer of his policy,” McCaul said. “But I can’t think of a better person to do that. … Her style is very different, obviously, from the president. He is very outspoken, says what’s on his mind. Kay will be more the diplomat.”
“She consummateplayer.how to is get a She things knows team done by dealing with people. Those are exactly the skills that will be required.” Phil Gramm, former U.S. senator