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

by Ronan Farrow

  Tillerson said he met with officials overseeing personnel every other week to address the problem. “They’ve not been easy,” he said of conversations with the White House about filling the open jobs. “The process over there has not been the most efficient and they’ve changed personnel trying to improve it, I mean, many, many times . . . it was very slow, it was very cumbersome, it was frustrating at times because you couldn’t get a sense of, ‘What’s the issue’? Someone seems to be kind of sitting in idle over there . . .” Tillerson sighed. “I would tell ’em, ‘Just give me a no, at least with a no, I’ll go get another name.’ ” He was reported to have exploded at White House personnel director Johnny DeStefano over meddling in his staffing decisions—including a rejection of his initial choice for deputy, Elliott Abrams, who was deemed too critical of Trump during the campaign. That role would sit empty for nearly five months. This was the problem across the Department. In one early conversation, a Tillerson aide gave me a specific reason he couldn’t respond to detailed questions about the budget cuts: “We’re just so thinly staffed, I don’t have time to get into that.”

  EVEN THE STATE DEPARTMENT’S most ardent champions often agree that the bureaucracy is no model of efficiency. Richard Holbrooke, in his 1970s complaint in Foreign Policy magazine, “The Machine that Fails,” decried the “sheer, unimaginable size” of the system and its stultifying procedures and protocols. James Baker, George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state, took a similar view, complaining of “too many bureaucratic layers, which can lead sometimes to sclerotic decision-making.”

  Trump administration officials invoked a similar logic. The goal, one told me, was to strip back the roving envoys and pet projects and restore power to the regional bureaus.

  “How do you restore power to the regional bureaus if there are no heads of regional bureaus in the building?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  “I don’t know what your experience with the Foreign Service is—”

  “Mixed,” I admitted.

  “It’s mixed. There are some bureaus where I can hand something to someone and I know with 100 percent confidence that I don’t have to look again. There are some where I have to start at the one-yard line and march it ninety-nine yards.”

  Like any large organization, and especially government organizations with little relationship between merit and compensation, the Foreign Service had its clock punchers and sullen, bored lifers. But it also had plenty of wonderful, dedicated public servants: men and women well qualified to make more money elsewhere, sacrificing much to protect American lives. In the end, the doubts behind the aide’s skepticism were self-fulfilling. American leadership no longer valued diplomats, which led to the kind of cuts that made diplomats less valuable. Rinse, repeat.

  Several former secretaries of state agreed with the premise of expansive cuts, but virtually all, spanning generations, took issue with the extent and execution of the ones championed by the Trump administration. The most supportive of significant downsizing, Baker, said that he believed in the urgency of restraining government spending in general and had “long believed that the State Department’s budgets could benefit from a review. . . . Of course,” he was quick to add, “I cannot respond to the scale of recent employee cutbacks at the State Department because I have not been briefed about them.”

  George P. Shultz, who served in Nixon’s and Reagan’s cabinets, said: “I think it’s a drastic cut. There’s no doubt that some things can be cut down like the special envoys. But fundamentally . . . you have to have regional bureaus, you have to have ambassadors, you have to have people who know the layout.” Shultz and Tillerson had both spent years in the private sector, Shultz at Bechtel, the construction and civil engineering company. Transitioning from a large corporation to a government organization, he said, “You don’t start out with the idea that you’re going to cut everything before you even know what’s going on.” The fact that Tillerson had moved so swiftly toward downsizing was “astonishing. Whether he was told to do that by the president, that was part of a condition of taking the job, I don’t know. On the other hand, if the president insists on something like that, I think it’s unacceptable. You can turn a job down.”

  Condoleezza Rice, who once served as a budget officer at Stanford University, was a believer in efficiency. “I don’t say 30 percent,” she told me in that clipped cadence retaining just a trace of her Alabama roots. “But I can’t say that there isn’t some tightening up that could be done at State . . . Some of these auxiliary positions, things grow like Topsy and nobody ever prunes them.” But, she said, other efforts to scale back under the Trump administration, like dropping democracy from the United States’ diplomatic mandate, “would be a spectacularly bad idea.” And even she questioned the battery of unfilled positions across the Department: “I don’t understand any reform that’s not going to have an assistant secretary for Europe and Latin America and Asia.”

  Other former secretaries were more exercised about the state of the Department. “I believe it is incalculable damage that’s been caused,” Madeleine Albright said. “What became very evident to me the minute the budget was proposed was that it was in fact cutting not just fat, but into the system.” Hillary Clinton described “getting rid of Arabic speakers, Korean speakers, Mandarin speakers, cutting back the number of young people who want to be Foreign Service officers who have language experience or are willing to take the two to three years necessary to master a difficult language” as “foolishness.”

  Colin Powell offered a similarly blunt assessment. The new administration was “ripping the guts out of the organization. Worse than that, they’re not filling these positions they’re planning to keep.” The hiring freeze was especially stinging for a secretary who had invested so personally in the workforce. “Any organization that stops bringing in new blood is hurting itself in the present and in the future. It’s a mistake. When you stop bringing people in or when you make it an undesirable place to be, then you are mortgaging your future.” He grinned. Powell had kept some of his more incisive observations on background. This one, he said, “you can use.”

  “It’s enormously costly,” John Kerry told me of what was, in the eyes of many in the building, becoming a relentless pummeling of the Department and the profession. “Look, in a couple years, if we get a presidency of either party that values diplomacy, you can fix a budget, you can invest again in the State Department, but it takes years to undo what’s happening because it takes years to build up expertise and capacity.”

  The effect on morale was immediate for those at a working level, watching their profession get dismantled as they tried to do their jobs. “It’s undisciplined and not based on effectiveness,” said Chris LaVine, the career official who had been working on Syria policy at State when news of the cuts hit. “It’s the equivalent of taking a sword to a mosquito.”

  24

  MELTDOWN

  AS FOGGY BOTTOM EMPTIED, America’s diplomatic foothold in confrontations around the world began to slip. In July 2017, Rex Tillerson and President Trump sat at the White House, shouting at each other about Iran. The deal to contain that country’s nuclear development, struck under Tillerson’s predecessor, John Kerry, required the administration to certify Iranian compliance to Congress every ninety days. The two men were meeting ahead of the latest of these milestones. “Why should I certify?” Trump demanded again and again, according to a source familiar with the meeting. Two of Trump’s hard-line advisers, Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, backed him up, insisting the deal was hurting American national security interests.

  Where Tillerson had been a seemingly enthusiastic enforcer of budget cuts, on several of these policy matters, he appeared to lay down in front of the bulldozer of the Trump administration. Tillerson’s response to Trump’s insistent questioning—that all evidence indicated that Iran had complied with and passed inspections by international investigators—agitated the president. By the end of the meeting, the source said, he wa
s furious. A Tillerson spokesperson later claimed accounts of the showdown were exaggerated, and that the president was “appreciative” of the input. But even he conceded, choosing his words delicately, that “not everyone in the room agreed with what the secretary was saying.” Public reports drawing on White House sources later gave the meeting a simpler description: a “meltdown.” Trump told his White House advisers to come up with alternative rationales for killing the deal. If the State Department wouldn’t give him what he wanted, he would simply work around it.

  The Iran deal had vexed Trump since the campaign. On the trail, he had said that his “number one priority” was “to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” In one stump speech, he’d offered his own rendition of the multilateral negotiations that led to the agreement: “Can you imagine?” he asked, head bobbing animatedly over a microphone, royal blue tie dangling, as ever, four inches longer than customary. He put a hand to his ear in a pantomime of a phone. “You call them: ‘We hear you’re making nukes.’ ‘OK, well let us check.’ They call: ‘No, we’re not making nukes there, you dumb son of a bitch.’ ” Trump mouthed the last words under his breath, like a kid in the back of class. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s appointee as CIA director—and, later, as Tillerson’s successor at State—tweeted shortly after his nomination for the former job: “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.” Trump himself had offered his share of Twitter condemnations. “Iran has been formally PUT ON NOTICE for firing a ballistic missile,” he tweeted on one occasion. “Should have been thankful for the terrible deal the U.S. made with them!” And then: “Iran is playing with fire—they don’t appreciate how ‘kind’ President Obama was to them. Not me!”

  The Iranians argued that their ballistic missiles were for self-defense and unrelated to the nuclear deal. But Western powers were concerned about the country’s expanding conventional arsenal—and nearer targets, like Israel, doubly so. Iran’s human rights record was similarly unredeemed. At the time of Trump and Tillerson’s showdown over certification in July 2017, at least three American citizens were being held by Iran on fabricated charges.

  Still, Iran was complying with the letter of the deal. The group responsible for enforcing the agreement’s rigorous inspections had, again and again, reported that the country was not cheating. Other than the United States, the many countries behind the deal were unanimous: there were no grounds for rolling it back. That went for even Trump’s fellow hard-liners elected abroad. “The nuclear deal with Iran was controversial but it has neutralised the possibility of the Iranians acquiring nuclear weapons for more than a decade,” UK prime minister Theresa May insisted, amid otherwise tough rhetoric.

  Initially, Trump continued to certify that Iran was in compliance. But each time, the administration made it clearer that they were doing so unhappily. After the ballistic missile test, the administration imposed a round of new sanctions, prompting the Iranians to claim the United States, not they, had violated the terms of the deal. In September 2017, US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley was dispatched to a conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, to make the case for exiting the deal. A few weeks later, Trump was openly threatening to do so. “We are not going to stand what they are doing with our country,” he said. “They’ve violated so many different elements, and they’ve also violated the spirit of that deal.” Even Rex Tillerson was falling in line: “In our view,” he said, parsing his words carefully, “Iran is clearly in default of these expectations.”

  OTHER DIPLOMATIC FEATS of the past received the same treatment. Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, making the United States only the third country to shun it after Syria and Nicaragua, both of which later changed course and joined. “Whoever believes that the world’s problems can be solved by isolationism and protectionism,” Angela Merkel said of Trump’s decision, “is making an enormous error.” “It’s just an incredible walking back of American leadership, and everywhere I go, I hear about it,” John Kerry later told me. “Foreign ministers wonder whether the president ever bothered to read or understand the Paris Agreement that let us set our own commitments in the first place. Why we wanted to abandon our seat at the table—why a businessman would do that, especially—is beyond me. Other countries are leading instead and their industries will be advantaged, making incredible amounts of money doing it. It’s self-defeating. China especially is reaping the benefits of us stepping back.”

  At the US embassy in Beijing, it fell to the second-in-command, career officer David H. Rank, to notify the Chinese of the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. He resigned instead, ending a twenty-seven-year career in the Foreign Service. His explanation, published in the Washington Post, was a lament for diplomacy in the modern age. “I worry about the frequently politically motivated portrayal of those who work for the American people as members of some mythical elite, separate and suspicious,” he explained. “I worry about the denigration of expertise at a time when a complex world demands it more than ever.” Finally, he wrote, “I worry at the erosion of the bipartisan consensus on the need for US leadership. . . . If that leadership does not come from us, it will come from elsewhere.”

  In front of a crowd of Cuban-Americans in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, Trump announced another diplomatic reversal, “canceling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba.” It was, in some ways, symbolic: the US embassy in Havana would remain open. But there were real rollbacks of progress, too. Americans traveling to Cuba once again faced tighter restrictions. They were banned from doing business with a new list of hotels and other enterprises deemed to be connected to the Cuban government. The move was intended to be tough on that government, but critics argued those hurt most would be small businesses like bed-and-breakfasts. As was typical of these rollbacks, the State Department was the last to learn. “Poor WHA,” said one career official, referring to the Western Hemisphere bureau ostensibly in charge of Cuba policy. No permanent assistant secretary had been nominated to run that office. The acting assistant secretary “was not informed about the Cuba policy change until the day of.” The new administration seemed intent on laying waste to the few diplomatic accomplishments its predecessors had left behind.

  IN OTHER CASES, the Trump era squandered diplomatic leadership by dint of chaos and blunder. These moments were bigger than the secretary of state and the sidelining of his department. They were born of a unique moment in American politics and the unique character of a reckless president hooked on Twitter. But they threw into relief the importance of muscular diplomacy, and the perils of its absence.

  Again and again the president’s off-the-cuff remarks threatened delicate areas of foreign policy. “We have plenty of options for Venezuela, and by the way, I’m not going to rule out a military option,” Trump said in 2017 as political turmoil roiled that country. He stood outdoors at his golf course in New Jersey, flanked by Tillerson (chewing his lip nervously) and Haley (attempting to break a world record for brow furrowing). Trump’s remark sparked a diplomatic row, with Venezuela’s defense minister calling it “an act of madness” and “supreme extremism” and the White House refusing a call from Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. This kind of hardball approach might well have found a place in aggressive diplomacy with Venezuela, but officials in the State Department’s Latin America bureau said that they had little insight into or ability to temper the president as he hurtled toward a standoff.

  A similar pattern played out in Trump’s relationships with European allies. Tillerson was among a group of officials—including National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster and Secretary of Defense James Mattis—who worked overtime to ensure President Trump included a commitment to collective defense when addressing NATO leaders during his first trip to Europe. It was a pledge considered nonnegotiable by every president since Truman. After months of aides’ careful planning to insert the concept into
prepared remarks, Trump ad-libbed and omitted the line. It took weeks for him to rectify the error, a tense period in which career officials engaged in triage, struggling to soothe alarmed allies.

  TRUMP SHOWED STILL LESS CAUTION after millions of people in northern Japan awoke to a beeping alert on their cell phones in late August 2017, telling them North Korea had launched missiles over their country. He issued an astonishing ultimatum: “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” he warned, once again from the golf course in New Jersey. “They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.” Presidential historians called it the most aggressive language from a commander-in-chief since Truman warned Japan of “a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth,” though no one could figure out if the parallel language was intentional. It was also exactly the kind of statement regional experts at the State Department, steeped in the sensitive trigger points of the complex relationship with North Korea, would have been well equipped to temper. But as far as anyone could tell, no expert of any kind had weighed in. “President Trump’s comment was unplanned and spontaneous,” said one senior official of the outburst. Pyongyang immediately threatened to retaliate by striking US territory in Guam. The president took to Twitter to double down. “Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely,” he wrote. “Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!”