![]() You have been tragic, but you are no Oedipus, Rex.Former US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson testified that he never asked former Donald Trump adviser Tom Barrack to conduct any diplomacy of behalf of the United States or pass any information on to a foreign government. Tillerson: you are only middling on this short list. There were a couple of Rex Hunts, one a former Falklands governor, another a former Australian football player. There was the exceptional Rex Harrison, the actor who spoke his way through so many great musicals. There have been only a handful of notable Rexes in our time. It’s a bit easier to stand up to your boss when you get a $180m retirement package before joining the administration. Where did Tillerson’s confidence and tenacity come from, if it wasn’t his competence in the job? Perhaps his partial truth-telling was the result of his overwhelming financial security. His successor, Mike Pompeo, was more forceful in recently condemning Russian interference, but as CIA director, it isn’t exactly obvious what he has done to stop it. Just last week Tillerson admitted that the Russians would meddle with this year’s midterm elections, although he somehow couldn’t find a way to spend any money to stop that interference. He even disagreed on Russia, a little: saying the nerve agent attack in the UK was “clearly” the work of Russia on Monday, even as the White House refused to say Moscow was involved. He disagreed on the Iran nuclear deal, which is at least consistent with talking to the North Koreans. “America’s diplomatic power is being weakened internally as complex global crises are growing externally,” warned John McCain and Jeanne Shaheen, the Republican and Democratic senators, in a letter to Tillerson late last year.Īnd yet even the hapless and hopeless Tillerson could sometimes tell the truth to his even more hapless and hopeless boss. Tillerson’s tenure was so bad, it prompted some rare bipartisan agreement. Among them was the leading foreign service official on North Korea, who retired just two weeks ago. He hollowed out the senior ranks with no rhyme or reason, leaving critical posts unfilled, while others simply quit or retired. He refused briefings from senior staff and refused to talk to the press. Sadly all those executive skills did not include the ability to retain or build a senior staff at the state department, where the exodus of experience and talent has been a diplomatic blowout. Tillerson arrived in his job with all the executive skills you might expect after a very long and triumphant career at the top of one of the biggest corporations in the world: ExxonMobil, where he was CEO for a decade. If that doesn’t qualify you for moronic status, it’s not clear what will. “Part of this bringing the budget numbers back down is reflective of an expectation that we’re going to have success in some of these conflict areas, getting these conflicts resolved and moving to a different place in terms of the kind of support we have to give,” he told a foreign policy crowd late last year. In fact he rationalized them by saying he wouldn’t need so much money because he was well on his way to solving the world’s problems. The proposed budgets would have decimated his own staff and operations, as well as international aid, and were mostly ignored by Congress last year. In year one, he agreed to an astonishing 31% cut to his own budget, followed by a 29% cut the following year. In two successive budgets, he presided over the systematic dismantling of the diplomatic machinery he was supposed to be operating. ![]() Tillerson cannot simply blame his obviously inept manager for this misery because he clearly castrated himself. Looking back on his career as the nation’s chief diplomat, Tillerson might pinpoint this as the foggiest of bottoms. That naturally led Tillerson to protest that he was fully intact, in terms of his own testicles. “You cannot publicly castrate your own secretary of state,” Corker told the Washington Post, without undermining your own diplomacy. That teensy difference of opinion – now rendered moot by Trump’s decision to sit down with Kim Jong-un – led to some more truth-telling about Tillerson and Trump, this time from Bob Corker, the Republican senator who chairs the foreign relations committee. Or maybe that was the cause of the exit interview. Why ever would it work now? That’s a great question Tillerson should ask Trump if he gets an exit interview. “Being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful secretary of state, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” his wonderful boss tweeted in October. ![]()
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