War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence

by Ronan Farrow

  When I mentioned the White House’s role in rumors of his demise, Tillerson made no effort to feign surprise. “Mhm,” he said, nodding. He’d been waiting for the question. “How do you deal with that?” I asked. “I ignore it,” he said flatly. He arched an eyebrow. “When you say the White House, who are you talking about?” It was a rhetorical question. “I’m not asking you to reveal sources. You understand the question though. The White House is comprised of how many people?” Brian Hook, Tillerson’s director of policy planning, chimed in that the answer was perhaps in the thousands. Tillerson waved him off. “But people that matter, people that might have an interest in whether I stay or leave, there’s about one hundred and sixty of them . . . .” Tillerson leaned in and, for a moment, I realized it must be unpleasant to be fired by him. “I’m not gonna reveal my sources, cause I know who it is. I know who it is. And they know I know.”

  According to three people who had heard Tillerson speak directly of the matter behind closed doors, this was a reference to Trump’s son-in-law-turned-adviser Jared Kushner. Tillerson, according to those sources, was convinced that Kushner, collaborating with another senior White House official, had been working to engineer Haley into the secretary of state job, to clear his own ascent to secretary of state. After Tillerson’s departure, sources close to him continued to maintain that Kushner had played an instrumental role in his demise. Tensions between the two men had been flaring regularly, often in the form of a public relations proxy war. When Tillerson prevailed in reinstating some of the humanitarian funds for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees that Haley had sought to withhold, press items discussing potential negative repercussions for Kushner’s Middle East peace efforts began appearing. Tillerson aides accused Kushner of planting them. The source close to the White House said Kushner had attempted to work with Tillerson and met with resistance. “Here’s what I saw: a president who surprised [Kushner] on the spot and said ‘you’re doing Mideast peace’ after the campaign. A guy who tried to brief Rex every single week but could never even get a call back or a meeting. . . . And it wasn’t just Jared. It was many people across the government, including fellow cabinet members, who complained.” A Tillerson aide bristled at the characterization of Kushner as a polite recipient of unexpected mandates, saying Tillerson had been forced to “have a pointed conversation” with Kushner, reminding him who was secretary of state.

  But, when I asked Tillerson whether he had been frustrated when core mandates typically led by the secretary of state were handed to Kushner, he was surprisingly passive. “Uh, no,” he said. “It’s not a point of frustration because I think, in most areas, there was clarity up front. It was pretty clear in the beginning the president wanted him to work on the Middle East peace process, and so we carved that out.” Had he pushed back? I asked. “No,” he said. “That’s what the president wanted to do.” Tillerson remained involved. Kushner would “come over” periodically to update him, “so at least we had full connectivity between that and all the other issues that we’re managing with the same countries and same leaders. We would give them input and suggestions: ‘probably want to think about this,’ ‘that’s going to be a non-starter . . . .’ ” Tillerson seemed passionate about fighting stories of his ouster. Surrendering Middle East peace, he greeted with a shrug. Hook, the director of policy planning, went a step further. “It’s important for parties in the region to know our peace team has the full backing of the president. . . . .” he said. “I know past administrations made different divisions of labor on Mideast peace, but ours is built around new approaches and much closer proximity to the president.” Having the imprimatur of the president’s son-in-law, he suggested, was a good thing.

  But the messy division of labor between Tillerson and Kushner had real consequences for American policy. When Tillerson began to work as a mediator in a dispute that saw Saudi Arabia and a number of Gulf States cut off relations with Qatar, an important counterterrorism ally, Trump veered off course, issuing a vociferous, off-the-cuff takedown of Qatar. It was a 180-degree turn from the narrative Tillerson had been pushing on the Sunday shows just a day before. Kushner, according to White House sources, had sided with the Saudis based on his close relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom Kushner considered a promising reformer. Middle East policy had been given to both men, and it appeared that Kushner, with a background in real estate and being the president’s son-in-law, was winning the tug-of-war.

  Colin Powell recalled similar turf wars with then–vice president Dick Cheney, and not fondly. “I’ve been in similar situations, where I suddenly discovered we’ve created military commissions. Wait a minute—that’s a legal matter and a legal matter the State Department has primacy on.” Did he have advice, I asked, for Tillerson? “I can’t tell. He may love it,” Powell said with a shrug. “I can’t tell that he objects.” And then, with a wry smile: “Maybe if we had ambassadors there, they’d pick it up—that’s what they do.” Powell was poking at a broader consequence of the Trump administration’s approach to State: a building increasingly unmanned and cut down to size.

  In March 2018, Tillerson himself became the latest diplomat to receive a pink slip. “Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State,” Trump tweeted. “He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service!” As was increasingly the norm, the State Department was the last to learn. “The Secretary had every intention of staying . . . .” read a statement from Goldstein, Tillerson’s spokesperson. “The Secretary did not speak to the president and is unaware of the reason.”

  Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, had little by way of diplomatic experience, and was more of a hawk than Tillerson. He had backed Trump’s saber-rattling calls to dismantle the Iran deal with his own, equally hardline statements and tweets. And he appeared to have internalized some of the lessons cited by White House officials about dealing with Trump’s ego. The president, he had said during his tenure as CIA director, “asks good, hard questions. Make[s] us go make sure we’re doing our work in the right way.” Trump, likewise, said he and Pompeo were “always on the same wavelength. The relationship has always been good and that is what I need as Secretary of State.”

  In the weeks leading up to the firing, Tillerson had attempted to communicate more support for the institution he ran, praising the value of the Foreign Service. The guillotine finally descending suggested that message was unwelcome. American diplomacy would be downsized, and there would be less dissent as it happened. Pompeo would step into a State Department where that mission was already well under way.

  23

  THE MOSQUITO AND THE SWORD

  TILLERSON HAD STUDIED engineering in college, a fact he mentioned with some frequency and which seemed to inform his hard-nosed approach to management. When I asked him what kind of a legacy he envisioned leaving behind as secretary of state, he spoke of institutional reform before policy. “I’m a very systems, process guy,” he said. And so, in April 2017, he began with a comprehensive survey, retaining a private consulting firm, Insigniam, to diagnose the health of America’s diplomatic organs.

  Over the course of several months, at a cost just north of $1 million, consultants surveyed more than 35,000 Department of State and USAID employees. This was regarded first as a good idea, and then, upon the delivery of the survey, a frustrating one. “It just made people crazy,” a Foreign Service officer in the Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) remembered. “I had to walk away from my computer for an hour before I could look at those questions.”

  “What should the Department stop doing?” the survey asked bluntly. What was a diplomat’s mission in six words (so the firm could make word clouds)? “It’s preposterous . . . a copy and paste from what a corporation would use, and even then, at almost any corporation, this would not have been customized enough,” the Foreign Service officer in INL told me. “What the hell?” the Operations office
r agreed. “I have some words for your cloud, but they all have four letters.” BuzzFeed declared the survey “straight out of Office Space,” and promptly made it into a listicle.

  But the results were revealing. Some of the officers’ complaints were quotidian. “The technology is terrible,” the survey concluded, noting that the DC-based Department used servers in Miami for some reason, and quoting a distraught employee’s lament that “with some PCs, you have to turn them upside down or they will burn out.” Rex Tillerson focused on these practicalities when I asked him about his objectives for reform. “We need to update and modernize ourselves,” he said. “I’m sure we’re using the same IT system that we were using when you were here.” Like a diplomatic Marie Kondo, he wanted to remove “clutter in the way people have to work.”

  But the survey also reflected more existential concerns. “People do not speak optimistically about the future,” the firm concluded. “The absence of a clear vision of the future allows room for speculation and rumor about what the future could bring, such as further USAID integration into [State] or the militarization of foreign policy.” One officer interviewed pleaded: “I am concerned that the dramatic reduction in budget, paired with extended staffing gaps at the most senior level, will result in the loss of not only an exceptionally talented group of people from our ranks, but will hamper our impact to fulfill our mission for decades to come.” Of the Trump administration and Rex Tillerson’s team at State, the Insigniam report concluded, “[p]eople question if these two groups understand the role the Department of State plays in forwarding the interests of the United States in the world.” Many “perceived [a] lack of support from the administration, from Congress, and from the new [State] leadership, and from the American people.”

  Rex Tillerson’s quest to de-clutter, it came to pass, was not about to allay these fears.

  THE ADMINISTRATION’S FIRST BUDGET floated to Congress proposed a 27 percent slash to the State Department’s funding—roughly $10 billion of the Department’s $52.78-billion budget. The White House wanted to eliminate all funding for the United States Institute of Peace and its mission to “guide peace talks and advise governments; train police and religious leaders; and support community groups opposing extremism.” It would gut health programs on HIV, malaria, and polio, and halve the United States’ contributions to United Nations peacekeeping missions. It hoped to shutter the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice, responsible for setting policy on war crimes. More radically, the administration sought to move the bureaus of refugee issues and consular affairs—responsible for the passport stamping and hostage extricating that are perhaps the Department’s most recognizable core competency—out of State entirely and into the Department of Homeland Security. Even the State Department’s mission statement was sized up for cuts. For the first time, an administration proposed removing “just” and “democratic” from the list of qualities the United States sought to encourage around the world.

  Few thought that the programs targeted for cuts were without need for reform. But there was steadily gathering outrage at the broad and seemingly cavalier nature of the cutbacks. Opposition reached a head in early 2018, when USAID, which reports to the State Department, took the unprecedented step of announcing that it would not comply with Tillerson’s efforts to reorganize his building and its own. “Per direction from the Front Office, we are suspending all USAID involvement . . .” an official said in an email to senior staff. “You should not work on any joint Redesign activities.” This was mutiny.

  That move had been preceded by months of bipartisan pushback against Tillerson’s plans. In a deco, wood-paneled hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Tillerson faced off against arched eyebrows and grandstanding from both sides of the aisle when he presented the administration’s first proposed budget. “After about five minutes” of reviewing the proposal, Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chair, reportedly recalled, “I said, ‘This is a total waste of time. I don’t want to do this anymore.’ And the reason it’s a waste of time is, I think you know, the budget that’s being presented is not going to be the budget we’re going to deal with.”

  “We’ll write our own budget, but I do think it has a chilling impact on State Department, with the career people trying to carry out their missions,” added Ben Cardin, the ranking Democrat. “Seventy years ago this month one of your predecessors, George Marshall, delivered a speech that helped cement his reputation as a key architect of the post-War effort to build a liberal international order. He was ‘present at the creation.’ My concern today, quite frankly, is that your Administration will go down in the history books as being ‘present at the destruction’ of that order we have worked so hard to support—and that has so benefited our security and prosperity and ideals.”

  Dirksen was a 1950s addition to the Hill. Its hearing rooms were among the first built with television in mind, eschewing round tables for rostrums designed for spectators. C-SPAN cameras picked up Tillerson nodding almost imperceptibly, a frown flickering across his face. But he gamely defended the deep cuts to his own organization, through hours of drubbing. Over the following year, Congress essentially tried to throw money at the Department, which Tillerson declined. He refused to accept $80 million in congressional funding earmarked for State to counter Russian propaganda, to the bafflement of many officials. It was almost unheard of for a cabinet official to refuse money already appropriated for his or her agency, and it raised eyebrows after the intelligence and defense communities asserted that Russia had been using propaganda to meddle in the presidential election. An aide said Tillerson feared the funds might anger Russia. Tillerson’s relations on the Hill frayed. One prominent Republican senator called the White House and threatened to subpoena Tillerson if he wasn’t more cooperative, according to a source at the White House and another on the Hill.

  Several former secretaries of state of both parties regarded with astonishment Tillerson’s pushback against funds for his Department. “Senators who believed in the State Department wanted to restore some of the money, or not agree to the cuts,” Madeleine Albright recalled. “Tillerson didn’t want the money. For me, I’ve never heard about anything like that.”

  When I pressed him on his defense of the budget, Tillerson appeared conflicted. He admitted, for the first time, that he had pushed back on the budget behind closed doors. “In fact, I had people around here who said, ‘You know, you need to leak your passback letter, you need to leak your appeals letter.’ And I said, ‘No, that’s not how I do things.’ ” Tillerson said he’d looked at the numbers proposed by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and assumed he could count on “plus ten, plus twenty percent, because we figure the congress is going to give us something there.” No other living secretary of state said they’d conducted budget advocacy this way, asking for less and leaving it to Congress to fight for their institution. Tillerson conceded he may have simply lacked experience. “Having been here one month, I didn’t have a real basis to do much other than work with OMB to understand what were their objectives. I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t get myself embroiled so much in the numbers themselves as much as trying to understand, ‘What are we trying to achieve here?’ ” In the end, Trump would replace Tillerson with complaints about needing to be on the same “wavelength” as his secretary of state anyway. Even the modest pushback behind closed doors had, apparently, been too much.

  Ironically, the greatest champions of State Department funding were sometimes on the military side: the generals, flush with cash in their own institution, seeking to spread the wealth. “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately,” Trump’s secretary of defense James Mattis told members of Congress in 2013, when he was CENTCOM commander. “I think it’s a cost-benefit ratio. The more that we put into the State Department’s diplomacy, hopefully, the less we have to put into a military budget.” But by 2017, even he appeared to flip that logi
c while advocating for a new era of increased defense spending: “Our military must ensure that the president and our diplomats always negotiate from a position of strength.” He had little to worry about. The same budget that eviscerated America’s civilian foreign policy apparatus proposed a $52-billion hike in defense spending.

  The Mahogany Row massacre had been nothing compared to the planned casualties of the budget offensive. More than 1,300 diplomats would get pink slips. New hiring was also frozen. Initially, it was announced that there would be no new classes of Foreign Service officers—the so-called “A 100” recruits who file off for training at a sort of Hogwarts for diplomats in the Virginia countryside before becoming full-fledged officers. Rangel and Pickering fellows, who are drawn from underrepresented communities and had already been promised spots in those classes, were suddenly left without a future. Outrage was so swift and decisive that some new recruits were reinstated. State also abruptly suspended its participation in the Presidential Management Fellows program, a prestigious apprenticeship long used to draw talent to the profession. The effect was tangible: the number of new recruits taking the Foreign Service entrance exam plummeted by 26 percent from the year before. It was the lowest level of interest in nearly a decade. Under the best of circumstances, the State Department faced intense competition from the private sector when it came to recruiting great minds. “Imagine today, when the handwriting is on the wall that Trump doesn’t value the State Department?” John Kerry said. “Imagine what that does to the best people?”

  There seemed to be just as little interest in filling the core leadership roles that had been left intact. Hundreds of senior positions sat empty. The building was being run almost entirely by deputies elevated to “acting” assistant secretary status, many of whom had decades less experience than their unceremoniously removed predecessors. When I asked Tillerson whether the unfilled posts were a source of anxiety, he puffed his chest and smirked. “I don’t have anxiety,” he said. This particular matter was, however, “a point of concern . . . the posts have been open too long. It’s not something I’m happy about.”