Tillerson Under the Microscope

As Tillerson has struggled with diplomatic crises in North Korea, Iran, Qatar, and elsewhere, Trump has contradicted and even embarrassed him, usually by emphasizing America’s willingness to use force instead of diplomacy.

  New Yorker

The New Yorker apparently doesn't think we need to be explicitly told that these diplomatic crises have all be caused by Dolt 45.

In a further slight, he has given Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, a broad portfolio of international responsibilities typically reserved for the Secretary of State.

[...]

In government, he has been uncomfortably subordinate to an unpredictable man. “I think running a Fortune 500 company is a whole lot easier than working as a Cabinet official, running foreign policy for the United State government,” a senior Trump Administration official told me. “It’s two different worlds. You cannot be God."

Tell it to your boss.

In n February, a few weeks after Tillerson was confirmed by the Senate, he visited the Oval Office to introduce the President to a potential deputy, but Trump had something else on his mind. He began fulminating about federal laws that prohibit American businesses from bribing officials overseas; the businesses, he said, were being unfairly penalized.

How can anyone work with this asshole? Even if you agreed with his policy desires, he can't for a minute focus on what you're telling him.

“Tillerson told Trump that America didn’t need to pay bribes—that we could bring the world up to our own standards,” a source with knowledge of the exchange told me.

Really? American politics runs on bribes.

At Exxon, Tillerson often dealt with foreign governments, but ethics were typically not the primary concern. When he was named C.E.O., in 2006, the company had eighty thousand employees doing business in almost two hundred countries, and annual revenues that approached four hundred billion dollars, making it richer than many nations. Its political power is similarly far-reaching; heads of state often defer to Exxon in order to secure its coöperation. In the U.S., it spends millions each year on lobbying Congress and the White House, and, through a political-action committee, contributes heavily to candidates, the overwhelming majority of them Republicans.

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In n 2002, a year after Congress passed the Patriot Act, a group of Senate investigators wanted to determine whether American banks were complying with the law’s restrictions against money laundering. One of them was Riggs Bank, in Washington, D.C. When the investigators began looking into Riggs’s books, they discovered several accounts, containing hundreds of millions of dollars, linked to Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, a tiny African nation with enormous gas and oil reserves. Some of the accounts were receiving deposits from ExxonMobil, which maintained large operations in the country. At the time, Tillerson was Exxon’s senior vice-president.

[...]

In some cases, the Senate investigators found, Exxon wired money directly to offshore bank accounts that Obiang controlled. In others, money was carried to the bank in suitcases containing millions of dollars in shrink-wrapped bundles. Exxon also contributed to a fund, controlled by Obiang, to send the children of high-ranking government officials to study in the United States.

That's what I said. Runs on bribes. Tillerson knows that. Tillerson ran Exxon, one of the biggest bribers in the world. They just do it in legal - if unethical - ways that some other countries don't bother with.

For a decade before Tillerson assumed the top job [at Exxon], he was in charge of overseas operations, securing new reserves to replace those refined and sold. When he was C.E.O., Exxon’s prospects for large oil discoveries increasingly migrated overseas, often to difficult places. That required negotiating multibillion-dollar deals with sometimes erratic and brutal foreign leaders.

And Congress doesn't care. They paid a little lip service to Exxon's lobbying to lift sanctions on some Middle East countries (including Iran) where they wanted to do oil business, but they confirmed him as Secretary of State anyway, while Tillerson pretended ignorance of Exxon's interests and past dealings.

Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, asked Tillerson, “Was there any country in the world whose record of civil rights was so horrible, or whose conduct so directly threatened global security or U.S. national-security interests, that Exxon wouldn’t do business with it?”

Tillerson’s answer seemed unconcerned with ethics. “The standard that is applied is, first, Is it legal?” he said. “Does it violate any of the laws of the United States to conduct business in a particular country? Then, beyond that, it goes to the question of the country itself. Do they honor contract sanctity?”

He was a perfect fit for government work.

The Senate voted to confirm Tillerson, but with forty-three votes against—more opposition than any other Secretary of State had faced in fifty years.

And how many of those 43 voted against him because they were assured that he'd pass confirmation anyway?

In 2015, Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, began an investigation into whether Exxon’s accounting related to climate change was fraudulent. The gist of the argument is that Tillerson’s assurances to shareholders [that Exxon was adding a “proxy cost” to all of its activities—a notional tax, in anticipation of increased environmental regulations, to make certain its projects were profitable] were fictitious, or at least greatly exaggerated. The actual additional cost that Exxon was figuring into its business decisions was much lower, Schneiderman claimed. “Exxon’s proxy-cost risk-management process may be a sham,” John Oleske, an attorney in Schneiderman’s office, wrote in one court filing.

[...]

Exxon has fought the investigation relentlessly, taking the unusual step of suing Schneiderman in federal court, on the ground that his suit violated the First Amendment. “The coercive machinery of law enforcement should not be used to limit debate on public policy,” lawyers for Exxon said.

"Debate"?

In the thousands of documents that Exxon has turned over, two things stand out. The first is that Tillerson, when he was C.E.O., maintained an Exxon e-mail account under an alias, Wayne Tracker. Schneiderman’s lawyers found dozens of e-mails from the account, which, they say, Tillerson used to send messages about the risks posed by climate change​. In court filings, Exxon lawyers said that the Wayne Tracker account was set up because Tillerson’s original account was flooded with e-mails sent by “activists.” When investigators asked Exxon to turn over other e-mails from the account, employees claimed that they had been inadvertently destroyed.

[...]

In 2009, Tillerson led an investment in oil shale, purchasing a company called XTO, in a deal valued at thirty-six billion dollars. The effort is widely seen as ill-considered and belated. “Exxon is going to be paying for that for a long time,” a former Exxon executive told me.

[...]

At this point, [Tillerson's Exxon] legacy seems mixed. Exxon is one of the largest and most consistently profitable corporations in the world, and will continue to be as long as fossil fuels are a dominant source of energy. But, since 2010, its stock price has mostly been below that of Chevron

I can see the dotard's tweets now. When he fires Tillerson, he'll be tweeting that Tillerson caused Exxon to have bad ratings.

On the issue of climate change, at least, Tillerson had managed to improve his company’s public image. But, as Secretary of State, that stance has done him little good. In June, Trump backed out of the Paris accords, despite Tillerson’s support for them. “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore,” Trump said. “And they won’t be.”

It was Trump, in fact, who had them laughing. But he's right. They've gone from laughing to hasty preparations for what they can see is a global cataclysm in the making.

Such mundane but essential concerns as the flight paths of airliners, the transfer of patents, and the dumping of waste in oceans—even the number of bluefin tuna that can be taken from the sea—are governed by international agreements.

The system came to have many crucial components—nato, the European Union, the United Nations—but its indispensable member was the United States.

[...]

The postwar system, for all its injustices and hypocrisies, has achieved the principal purpose that Acheson and others set out for it: the world has not fallen into a third enveloping war.

Tell that to the Syrians. WTF? There most certainly is an eveloping war. Much of the Middle East, some of Africa, and increasingly European countries, are bombed and terrorized daily.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump struck a fervently nationalistic tone. For years, he said, the United States has protected ungrateful allies who were freeloading on America’s labors.

Just like the Puerto Ricans. God, he hates a freeloader. This is a man who has had everything handed to him on a silver platter, and who literally pushes a button on his desk to have someone bring him a Coke, saying other people want everything done for them.

Trump presented a world view in which the interests of the United States were much more narrowly defined; [...] describing not just an abdication of global leadership but an America more concerned with asserting its prerogatives than with maintaining long-term friendships.

Tillerson’s own vision—apart from a commitment to efficiency—is less clear. Unlike his predecessors, he has not given a major foreign-policy address in which he has outlined a world view.

I'm guessing he doesn't have one. As he repeatedly told people while running Exxon, he's a businessman.

Even in his public role, Tillerson has conducted himself more like a businessman making deals. “If you’re a senior executive at Exxon, any day you wake up and you’re not in the newspapers, that’s a good day,” a former senior American official who knows Tillerson told me. “I don’t think he’s used to operating in the public glare.” He has effectively abandoned an essential part of the top diplomat’s role: that of explaining his actions, and the world, to the American public.

Dotard J could take a lesson.

On n Tillerson’s first day as Secretary of State, he appeared in the lobby auditorium of the nondescript building, on C Street, in Washington, that houses the State Department, and spoke to a crowd of employees. He started with a joke: “We apologize for being late. It seemed that at this year’s prayer breakfast people felt the need to pray a little longer.”

Bold! But maybe he wasn't talking about Trump.

Indeed, as time went on, Tillerson appeared to be one of several Trump Cabinet secretaries, like Scott Pruitt, at the Environmental Protection Agency, who were essentially hostile to the departments that they were heading.

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In the months after Tillerson took over, scores of senior diplomats retired, quit, or requested sabbaticals. Few were fired outright; as civil servants, they retained substantial protections against being terminated. Some left after being told that their jobs were to be eliminated and others after they were removed from their posts without being reassigned. Some were unwilling to serve in a Trump Administration. Others concluded that neither Tillerson nor Trump understood the role of diplomacy in American foreign policy.

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In addition, Tillerson suspended the hiring of new Foreign Service officers, including many who had accepted fellowships in the expectation of a job. (He has since allowed two Foreign Service classes to move forward.) “These cuts will decimate the Foreign Service,” Nick Burns, a former Under-Secretary of State, told me. “The Foreign Service is a jewel of the United States. There is no other institution in our government with such deep knowledge of the history, culture, language, and politics of the rest of the world.”

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In August, Tom Malinowski, an Assistant Secretary of State in the Obama Administration, described to me a visit to State’s headquarters, in Foggy Bottom: “There’s furniture stacked up in the hallways, a lot of empty offices. The place empties out at 4 p.m. The morale is completely broken.

So maybe Trump will simply not appoint another Secretary after he fires Tillerson. After all, he believes himself to be the only one who can "fix" things.

I'm sure there is lots of "dead wood" in most government agencies, and perhaps State is one that lends itself especially well to political favors appointments.

A number of veteran diplomats conceded that there were areas at State that were unnecessary. The best example, they said, was the sixty-six special envoys and representatives, created at various times by Congress and the White House—essentially, senior diplomats given ambassadorial rank.

[...]

But what Tillerson has proposed is far more ambitious than eliminating a few dozen jobs. He has suggested deep cuts for humanitarian aid and economic development—the whole range of initiatives designed to alleviate suffering and to advance America’s interests. His budget called for drastically reducing or completely dissolving programs to help refugees, deliver aid to countries hit by disaster, support fledgling democratic movements, protect women’s groups, and fight the spread of H.I.V. and aids.

[...]

“It was a total waste of time to go through the line items and even discuss them, because it’s not what is going to occur,” Bob Corker, a Republican and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Tillerson at a hearing.

I wouldn't bet on it.

According to the senior Administration official, Nikki Haley, the U.N. Ambassador, is seen as the most effective diplomat in the [North Korea] crisis; twice she has rallied unanimous support for tighter sanctions at the U.N. Security Council, despite the members’ reluctance to discomfit China. “Nikki’s getting it done,” the official told me. “She’s bringing home the bacon.” This has apparently fed an enmity between Tillerson and Haley. “Rex hates her,” the official said. “He fucking hates her.”

So, maybe out of spite, after he fires Tillerson, Trump makes Haley Secretary of State.

Tillerson made a striking diplomatic slip [in talks with Xi Jingping]: he told the Chinese that he was hoping for a relationship with “no conflict, no confrontation, mutual respect, and win-win coöperation.” Chinese officials saw it as a recognition of their country’s equal status in the Pacific—or, more cynically, as an admission that the U.S. would not resist its aggressive moves in the region. “Tillerson’s words came as a surprise, to the delight of many in Beijing but to the dismay of some in Washington,” China Daily, a Communist Party newspaper, reported. The slip did not go unnoticed among American observers. “He had not adequately consulted the experts when he went into those talks,” the senior Administration official told me.

But isn't that exactly the kind of talk Trump insists is proper with Russia?

The Administration believes that the prospect of a nuclear-armed North Korea is worse than the prospect of war.

Is the reporter daft or is the Administration? No, wait....Is the reporter as daft as the Administration? "The prospect of a nuclear-armed North Korea?" North Korea is already nuclear-armed.

The North Koreans, similarly, have suggested that they prefer war to giving up their nukes.

Okay. Somebody get back in there and edit this article.

Tillerson told me [...] , “In the United States, diplomacy has always been backed up by a very strong military posture. As I said to the state councillor of China, ‘If you and I don’t solve this, these two guys get to fight."

Imagine how much money could be made if the WWE put those two in a ring.

A senior European diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me that the overwhelming perception of American foreign policy among European governments was chaos—that there was no way to know what the Trump Administration wanted to do, whether it was withdrawing from the global scene or just acting unilaterally.

Imagine that.

The uncertainty was compounded by the fact that there were few people in the White House or the State Department whom they could talk to. “Obama, Kerry—we talked all the time,” the diplomat said. “Tillerson has never taken the initiative to call.”

And everybody knows it's pointless to talk to Trump.

Part of the problem is that Tillerson has not entirely given up the perspective of an imperial C.E.O. He rarely meets with legislators, and has sometimes been high-handed with fellow Cabinet members. “It is a fundamentally counterproductive form of hubris,” the official told me. “People who should be easy allies for him, he’s kneecapping them.”

Sounds Trumpian to me. Maybe part of the reason they don't get along. Both want to be God.

Another official told me that Tillerson’s sole reason for staying was loyalty to his country: “The only people left around the President are generals and Boy Scouts. They’re doing it out of a sense of duty.”

Bullshit. Jeff Sessions is still there. Jared Kushner. Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Bullnose Sanders. Rick Perry. Ben Carson. Mnuchin, Zinke, Pruitt. Not a one of them has a sense of duty to anything other than themselves.

In June, shortly after the Administration announced that it was pulling out of the Paris accords, David Rank, the Deputy Ambassador to China, decided to resign, rather than deliver the official notice of withdrawal to the Chinese government. Rank told me that his greatest fear is that the damage done to the State Department, and to the American-led international order, will be too extensive to repair. Reflecting on his three decades as a diplomat, Rank said, “Maintaining our network for foreign relations is hard. It requires constant attention, a lot of people, a lot of work. Sometimes it’s beyond us. But rebuilding it? Not a chance.”

[...]

In the popular mythology, the generals and the Eagle Scouts—Tillerson, Mattis, Kelly, and H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser—can protect the country from Trump’s most impulsive behaviors. But the opposite has proved true: Trump has forced them all to adopt positions that seem at odds with their principles and intentions.

Bingo.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.