Rex Tillerson Isnt the Problem. Its Trump.
Interesting story. I think they are both chumps. I can not believe Tillerson--a self made successful CEO continues to take crap and demeaning comments from Trump.
Rex Tillerson Isn’t the Problem. It’s Trump.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/02/rex-tillerson-state-department-lessons-trump-administration-216000
Amid reports that the White House wants to dump the secretary of state, it’s important to understand why he failed—and how his successor might, too.
By AARON DAVID MILLER and RICHARD SOKOLSKY
December 02, 2017
The Friday Cover
It appears that those who have been calling for Rex Tillerson’s head—which includes most of the foreign policy know-it-alls inside the Beltway—may have finally gotten their wish. The Trump administration’s public shaming of Tillerson this week—seeking to degrade and humiliate him into resignation, like something out of “Game of Thrones,” minus the blood, dragons and nudity—doubtless accelerated the likelihood of a “Rexit.”
This isn’t a Shakespearean tragedy; Tillerson was a self-made man, had a brilliant career at Exxon-Mobil, has gobs of money and if/when he departs Trumpland, will likely live happily ever after.
Even so, Tillerson’s position appears untenable.
On Friday afternoon, Trump himself took to Twitter to deny that change was afoot: “The media has been speculating that I fired Rex Tillerson or that he would be leaving soon - FAKE NEWS! He’s not leaving and while we disagree on certain subjects, (I call the final shots) we work well together and America is highly respected again!”
But before we say goodbye to a man who may well turn out be the shortest-tenured secretary of State in modern history, it's critical that his situation at State be properly understood. We don’t come to this space to bury or praise him. But it is important—at least from our vantage point of decades of experience at State—to get a better perspective on what went wrong, in part because whoever succeeds him may well face the same impossible conundrum.
We’d be the first to admit that Tillerson—a veritable ingénue in the strange ways of State, Washington, and the Trump orbit—was probably not the best guy for the job. Alone among secretaries of state in the modern period, Tillerson had no government or military experience and was totally a product of the private sector. He reportedly wasn’t Trump’s first, second or even third choice for the job (we wonder sometimes if Trump selected Tillerson because in the president’s vision of the alpha males, he looked like a secretary of state, straight out of central casting). And, of course, he was working for a president who was a foreign policy Neanderthal.
We agree with many of Tillerson’s critics: He played a bad hand badly. He was too insular and secretive, failing to engage senior and experienced department officials; too willing to accept the White House’s severe cuts to State’s budget without a fight; too invisible, unwilling to engage constituencies and do public station identification on what American foreign policy meant under the Trump Administration; and too committed to a redesign/reform program that seemed devoid of any strategic logic to just about anyone familiar with the State Department.
And yet despite all of these missteps and mistakes, we believe that because of the preternatural strangeness of Trumpland, Tillerson never had chance to succeed. In the end, he was trapped on the one hand between a president with little regard for diplomacy or the State Department (and who possessed, at best, a passing superficial respect for him), and on the other hand, the cruel and unforgiving realities of a world beyond America’s shores, which left him with a bundle of challenges impossible to manage, let alone resolve.............................................
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