Other views: ‘State Department is not missing a beat’

Rex Tillerson, secretary of State:

“The State Department is not missing a beat just because we’ve got some nominees that are still working through the process. ... While we don’t have any wins on the board yet, I can tell you we are much better positioned to advance America’s interest around the world than we were 10 months ago, and it’s all attributable to the great men and women of this department. ... We’ve had multiple teams working on the redesign. ... We’re going to transition to phase three, which is now execution.”

Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky, CNN:

“Whatever the president thinks of Tillerson, he doesn’t deserve to be treated this way. ... Tillerson was from the beginning a decent man caught in an impossible situation. But he played a bad hand badly. ... Pompeo is closer to the president personally and on matters of policy. But it’s far from clear that he will have any more success navigat- ing the fraught line between a cruel and unforgiving world of unresolvable problems on one hand and a president with little regard for diplomacy or the State Department and no coherent process of formulating U.S. foreign policy on the other hand.”

Max Boot, Council on Foreign Relations:

“Odds are that Pompeo will do better than Tillerson — it would be nearly impossible to do any worse. But that doesn’t mean that U.S. foreign policy will become any more coherent or effective. That would require changing presidents, not secretaries of State.”

Josh Lederman, AP:

“It’s a go-to catchphrase when Tillerson is called on to explain his boss on the world stage: ‘America first is not America alone.’ Yet as President Trump declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, Tillerson on Wednesday stood all by himself.”