Window Seat on the World

by Glen Johnson

  By August, about six months into Tillerson’s tenure, seventy-one ambassadorships remained unfilled, including those for close allies like Australia and key regional players such as South Korea. The same was true for the assistant secretary job overseeing the East Asian and Pacific region—despite the concerns about North Korea and its saber-rattling in the region.498

  When the dispute about who murdered Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi erupted in October 2018, the United States still didn’t have ambassadors to either Turkey or Saudi Arabia—two Middle East powers and the principals in the diplomatic crisis.

  The vacancies existed even though the Republican Party controlled not only the White House but also Congress. The GOP could confirm virtually anyone nominated, but names were not forwarded.

  “By failing to fill numerous senior positions across the State Department, promulgating often incoherent policies, and systematically shutting out career Foreign Service officers from decision-making, the Trump administration is undercutting US diplomacy and jeopardizing America’s leadership role in the world,” said the Foreign Policy story, based on interviews with more than three dozen current or former diplomats.499

  The concern was underscored on October 1, 2017, when the president released another tweet criticizing his secretary of State’s efforts to negotiate an arms control agreement with the North Koreans. Trump had already threatened to rain “fire and fury” on the nation if it continued to threaten the United States with ballistic missiles.

  “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” the president wrote, using his nickname for Kim Jong Un, president of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. In a follow-up tweet, President Trump added: “. . . Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”

  The situation headed toward the untenable, though, three days later.

  _________

  NBC NEWS, QUOTING A dozen current and former senior administration officials, reported Tillerson had been on the verge of resigning during the summer and was talked out of it only after Vice President Mike Pence urged him to stay at least until the end of 2017.500

  Both President Trump and his secretary of State had already been dogged by questions of a “Rexit” due to dissatisfaction on both sides.

  The true bombshell in the report, however, was that Tillerson supposedly called the president a “moron” after a July 20 national security meeting at the Pentagon. Another version said the secretary had used the words “fucking moron.”

  The report prompted a media feeding frenzy, heightened when Tillerson delivered hastily drafted remarks to reporters at the State Department. The secretary looked rattled as he walked up to the podium, carrying a stack of papers with his comments.

  “The vice president has never had to persuade me to remain the secretary of State because I have never considered leaving this post,” Tillerson said.501

  He added: “While I’m new to Washington, I have learned that there are some who try to sow dissension to advance their own agenda by tearing others apart in an effort to undermine President Trump’s own agenda. I do not and I will not operate that way, and the same applies to everyone on my team here at the State Department.”502

  The secretary refused to answer whether he, in fact, had called the president a moron. He told CNN in one interview, “I’m not playing. These are the games of Washington. These are the destructive games of this town. They’re not helpful to anyone. And so my position on it is I’m not playing.”503

  During the same interview, CNN host Jake Tapper asked about a comment made by Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He complained President Trump had “castrated” Tillerson with repeated comments undercutting his diplomacy.

  “I checked,” Tillerson replied lightheartedly. “I’m fully intact.”504

  By Thanksgiving 2017, lawmakers from both parties were complaining about the secretary’s refusal to fill senior diplomatic posts.

  Tillerson had already offered $25,000 buyouts in an effort to cut two thousand career diplomats and civil servants, and he’d filled only ten of the top forty-four political positions in the State Department.

  The number of career ambassadors and career ministers—veteran Foreign Service officers who are the Department’s version of four- and three-star generals—was set to drop from thirty-nine to nineteen as of December 1.

  The secretary’s spokesman disputed the cuts had diminished State’s effectiveness.

  “There are qualified people who are delivering on America’s diplomatic mission,” R. C Hammond told The New York Times. “It’s insulting to them every time someone comes up to them and says that the State Department is being gutted.”505

  About a week later, there were widespread reports the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, had drafted a plan to replace Secretary Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo. He in turn would be replaced by Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican and Kerry diplomatic critic who also was an Army combat veteran.

  The secretary labeled the reports “laughable,” but they hung in the air until President Trump sent a tweet saying, “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!”506

  Tillerson convened another employee town hall, this time taking questions while trying to allay concerns about his job security. He also granted a lengthy interview to 60 Minutes in which he fleshed out his personality. The Eagle Boy Scout said he lived by a “Code of the West” where his word was his bond.507

  He also said he subscribed to the cowboy maxim you “ride for the brand,” meaning a person remains steadfast to his employer.

  “I’m here to serve my country. I committed to this president. My word is my bond. I ride for this brand,” Tillerson said.508

  But a month later, during a trip to Africa, he got his call from Chief of Staff Kelly, telling him he’d been fired.

  The message was delivered on March 13, 2018, as Tillerson wrapped up what had been devised as a goodwill tour. The secretary was making the rounds after President Trump was said to have disparaged the continent less than three months earlier.

  He reportedly asked why the United States should accept immigrants from Haiti and some “shithole countries” in Africa.509

  _________

  TILLERSON HANDED OVER HIS duties to Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan at midnight on March 13, the end of the day he learned he’d been sacked. He didn’t formally leave the State Department until March 31, and it was nearly another month before Pompeo replaced him.

  Pompeo’s arrival at the Department was delayed by a trip he took immediately after being confirmed and sworn in on April 26. The new secretary headed directly for Andrews Air Force Base and flew overnight to Brussels for NATO meetings. He then traveled to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan before entering the Harry S Truman Building on May 1 for his first day in the office.

  “I think I have the record for the longest trip to the first day of work,” he joked to the hundreds of employees who greeted him in the C Street Lobby.510

  He went on to say he hoped to help the Department reclaim its “swagger,” a public acknowledgment of the demoralization that had occurred during Tillerson’s tenure.

  Pompeo expanded on the theme two weeks later, both in an email announcing he was lifting the Department’s hiring freeze and during an interview on Fox News Sunday.

  “We’ve got to go put the diplomatic team on the playing field,” he told host Chris Wallace. “We’re going to get our swagger back, and the State Department will be out in front in every corner of the world leading America’s diplomatic policy, achieving great outcomes on behalf of President Trump and America.”511

  In September, he launched his Instagram account with a Photoshopped State Department seal reading “Department of Swagger.”

  The declar
ations improved the mood at the State Department, because they hinted at a return to the relevance it enjoyed under Secretary Kerry and most of his predecessors. But they also masked a shift between the diplomatic approaches held by Pompeo and Tillerson.

  Secretary Tillerson often found himself out of sync with President Trump’s tweets because he pursued policies largely maintaining the approach used by the Obama administration and Secretary Kerry.

  For example, when it came to North Korea, President Trump threatened “fire and fury,” but Tillerson took a diplomatic tack by enlisting China to bring its client state to heel—as Secretary Kerry did during each of our trips to Beijing. The same was true with the Iranian nuclear deal; President Trump railed against it, but Tillerson succeeded four times in getting his boss to maintain the sanctions relief signed in Vienna by Secretary Kerry.

  Tillerson also didn’t exhibit the same hostility for the Paris climate agreement expressed by President Trump.

  The president announced on June 1, 2017, he planned to withdraw from the accord. In September 2017, though, Tillerson said the United States could remain “under the right conditions.”512

  The president had previously said much the same himself, but such comments from Tillerson bolstered repeated news stories portraying him, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and then National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster as the “adults in the room” with Trump.

  The three sober business and military men were described as a counterbalance to the more volatile president.

  The day he fired Tillerson, the president abandoned his prior support and branded the secretary “totally establishment in his thinking,” The Wall Street Journal reported.513

  By contrast, Rolling Stone tartly described Pompeo as “a blustering hawk in sync with Trump’s worst instincts for confrontation and go-it-alone risk-taking in global affairs.”514

  President Trump had announced a week before the firing he’d meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un without preconditions. It was a move Pompeo—not Tillerson—had helped negotiate while CIA director. The incoming secretary also strongly opposed the Paris accord and the Iran deal, which the president ultimately abandoned two months after firing Tillerson.

  Similarly, Pompeo sided with President Trump when he supported Saudi Arabia in the dispute with Qatar that Tillerson had tried so fervently to resolve. As a former congressman, Pompeo also had the political skills the outgoing secretary lacked.

  Unlike Tillerson, Pompeo called up all the living secretaries of State—including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, whom he’d slammed in Congress over the Benghazi attack—asking for their insights and advice before his confirmation hearing.515

  Speaking with reporters after firing Tillerson, the president acknowledged the contrast between the two secretaries he had picked.

  “We were not really thinking the same,” Trump said of Tillerson. “With Mike Pompeo, we have a very similar thought process. I think it’s going to go very well.”516

  _________

  NUMEROUS PEOPLE HAVE ASKED if I’m despondent the Trump administration undid many of the diplomatic achievements from Secretary Kerry’s tenure.

  It’s frustrating, of course, but I don’t view my service in that context. I know I worked as hard as I could, every day and night for four years, to help my boss, the president, and his administration in their diplomatic endeavors.

  I’m proud of the successes, understand the failures, and feel any reversal isn’t a reflection on the quality of our work but on the different views held by our successors.

  My former employer, The Boston Globe, asked me to write an op-ed following President Trump’s May 2018 decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal. The editor wondered whether I was personally deflated, especially after all that time we spent holed up in Vienna and traveling before and after the final agreement.

  I felt no one cared how the decision affected me personally, but I could write about my concerns for its effect on our country.

  “In vowing to go alone, Trump is turning our country against an agreement it negotiated. The others will remain parties to the deal, selling the Iranians their cars, airplanes, and weapons systems,” I wrote. “He will also buttress Iranian hard-liners,” and “do so just before sitting down with Kim Jong Un of North Korea, a country that already has nuclear weapons, and asking him to dispose of them in exchange for promises of military and economic relief.”517

  None of that added up to a smart decision, in my mind.

  Likewise, for all the criticism of the Obama administration’s efforts to negotiate Middle East peace, the Trump administration showed no immediate success in its own efforts, despite them being spearheaded by one of the president’s own family members, Jared Kushner.

  In fact, it widened the gulf between the Israelis and Palestinians by moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, allowing additional Israeli settlement construction, and cutting US aid to the Palestinians.

  The most bothersome of President Trump’s reversals was his administration’s willful ignorance about global warming and climate change.

  The greatest gift from my work with Secretary Kerry was the first hand insight I gained about our planet’s changing environment.

  As I’ve written, the effects near the North Pole are already evident. Glaciers are receding and calving, once-frozen bays now brim with whitecaps, and the temperature is steadily increasing.

  Those aren’t political statements but documentable facts.

  And while such changes aren’t yet as apparent near the South Pole, the scale of Antarctica is so vast I can’t conceive how mankind recovers once it crosses its tipping point.

  That’s why I have no patience for anyone questioning the science or evidence, especially someone with the ability to see the same things we all saw. And the president of the United States has the time and resources, if he or she is so inclined.

  As Secretary Kerry said repeatedly, if you’re wrong about climate change but act to address it, the worst that can happen is you improve the environment and advance renewable energy. But if you’re right and do nothing, the consequences are disastrous.

  On November 21, 2018, the eve of Thanksgiving, President Trump confused weather with climate when he tweeted, “Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS—Whatever happened to Global Warming?”

  When I saw that tweet, I lost the self-control I’d embraced since leaving Washington. I responded to my first presidential tweet.

  “You’re a fucking idiot,” I wrote, before urging him to use his privileged position to see the world and learn for himself. Climate change isn’t a political issue, I added, but a fact of life that will affect his children and grandchildren.

  I later deleted the tweet, faulting myself for my use of profanity toward a president of the United States. But I have absolutely zero patience or respect for climate-change deniers after what I saw from 2013 to 2017.

  _________

  AT THE SAME TIME, my beliefs about the new administration weren’t absolute.

  For example, while I joined many in feeling mortified when President Trump threatened “fire and fury” against a leader he childishly labeled “Little Rocket Man,” if that approach ultimately brought the North Korean leader to the negotiating table—as happened in Singapore—I give the president credit for his achievement.

  The negotiation halted missile tests that bedeviled the Obama administration, and it gained freedom for two American hostages. President Trump engaged diplomatically rather than militarily in what President Obama had warned him would be his No. 1 foreign policy challenge. It also broke the precedent of prior administrations that continually issued empty threats as the DPRK crossed each threshold for advancing its nuclear weapons capability.

  If an unconventional approach yielded an agreement to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, President Trump would deserve all the credit he could get.

  Many friends have also asked me what I learned about leadership, an
d what I might recommend for achieving our country’s foreign policy objectives given my experience at the State Department.

  In terms of leadership, I was surprised by a common denominator between President Obama, Secretary Kerry, and the military brass accompanying us on our trips.

  All of them were readers.

  Of course, plenty of what they read was required for their jobs, from voluminous briefing papers to news clippings keeping them abreast of current events. But each of them also found time to read, usually history and other nonfiction books.

  I sat across the aisle from Senator John McCain in January 2015 as we flew to Saudi Arabia for the funeral of King Abdullah. After we chitchatted, he reached into his seatback and pulled out Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate. The Navy veteran, former prisoner of war, congressman, and two-time presidential candidate still felt there was something he could learn about President Johnson and the institution he had been serving for nearly thirty years.

  I also listened and watched as Frank Pandolfe studied French on his computer—a year before he would retire as a three-star Navy admiral.

  This focus reminded me of a comment by James Mattis, the Marine Corps general who’d go on to be Defense secretary. He was asked in 2003 about the importance of reading, particularly in the context of leading members of the armed forces.

  “The problem with being too busy to read is that you learn by experience (or by your men’s experience), i.e. the hard way,” Mattis replied. “By reading, you learn through others’ experiences, generally a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.”518

  I hope this book contributes to such important enlightenment, for reasons both personal and professional.

  As for my foreign policy recommendations, the major one is our country shouldn’t be shy about asserting itself diplomatically in ways that previously might have been seen as undiplomatic.

  I can understand President Trump’s obsession with border control not for the xenophobia seeming to underpin it, but because it’s a fact of life around the world.