According to Friday’s New York Times, Rex Tillerson, former CEO of oil giant Exxon and Trump’s chosen Secretary of State, is drastically cutting employees and positions in the State Department, including some of the highest ranking officials with years of experience in diplomacy. Tillerson believes that many managers in the middle and lower levels do not do anything worth doing and their positions should be eliminated. He is acting on that belief.[1]
In this writer’s opinion, Tillerson’s appointment will come to be regarded as the most damaging of all Trump’s appointments. Here’s why:
The Secretary of State, now Tillerson, is the President’s chief foreign affairs adviser. He carries out the President’s foreign policies through the State Department and the Foreign Service. More importantly, the Secretary advises the President on all matters involving foreign political entities.
The US Department of State, headed by the Secretary of State, functions as the diplomatic wing of the federal government, handling matters of foreign affairs with other nations and international bodies. The State Department’s primary job is to promote American foreign policy throughout the world.
The State Department’s single most valuable asset is its vast institutional knowledge, much of which is not to be found in file cabinets or hard disks, but in the minds and memories of State Department personnel who acquired it on their travels around the world in the course of their diplomatic careers. It is difficult to adequately describe the full spectrum of such knowledge, but it includes familiarity with foreign officials and diplomats, the grasp of current local conditions, historical backgrounds of nations and regions to which they were assigned, and, in general, information that our government requires to make informed decisions regarding the complex situations that inevitably arise in international relations.
Tillerson, for all his intelligence and business experience, obviously hasn’t a clue to how the State Department actually works, which is unexpected from the CEO of a major corporation. Exxon undoubtedly has diplomatic professionals in-house or on retainer to manage its relations with foreign nations. On the other hand, my observation is that institutional knowledge is not highly regarded in the oil business where persons are, for all practical purposes, fungible and disposable, that is, easy to replace, irrespective of skill, knowledge and experience.
It is not uncommon to walk into an office of an oil company after six months’ absence and discover that the bosses are all new, half the staff has been replaced, and one’s old friends have either taken early retirement or simply been let go.
The job of a diplomat is far more difficult than a job in the oil industry, because his knowledge is almost impossible to replace. Statecraft is specialized, deep, and acquired over many years of experience working with foreign leaders and governments. This familiarity with people and places gives him a unique viewpoint among politicians and bureaucrats, who woefully lack on-the-ground experience. He, unlike his elected superiors, can predict with some confidence how foreign nations in his area of expertise will react to what the U.S. says and does.
In short, the Foreign Service constitutes the experienced eyes and ears of our policymakers. Without it, we are blind and deaf to what is happening in the rest of the world. Why is Tillerson, presumably with permission or on orders from Trump, deliberately destroying an agency of vital importance to the U.S.?
There are not a lot of different reasons that a former CEO would tear out the eyes and ears of the U.S. government:
Perhaps he sincerely believes that the State Department is staffed with useless employees that advance neither the purpose of the department of the welfare of the nation, “cruft,” in other words. The State Department has been sneered at for many decades. Dean Acheson once proposed to President Eisenhower that he be commissioned to clean out the department of worthless personnel. Luckily for our nation, Eisenhower politely declined.
Tillerson is reputed to be a close friend of Vladimir Putin and he does not want that relationship to be carefully examined. U.S. diplomats are old hands at sniffing out hidden activities that may adversely affect the U.S. If Tillerson packs the department with inexperienced novices supervised by ignoramuses loyal to only himself, it will be unable to perform its mission. Even if a successor tries to repair the damage, he will find it nearly impossible to woo former employees back or find inexperienced but talented persons that could get up to speed quickly. Who in his right mind would want to work for a person like him?
Perhaps Tillerson believes he is a management genius. Perhaps he believes his genius is manifested in higher profits resulting from laying people off. Oil companies are notorious for hiring when the price of oil is high and mass firing when the price of oil falls below a profitable price. He likely believes that his genius will eventually be recognized for cutting the State Department budget by 30% without loss of effectiveness. Like so many of his ilk, he will be gone before people notice that he has nailed several more nails into the coffin of America’s prestige and power.
He could be a psychopath, void of empathy or decency, whose only desire in life is to reach the top of the executive heap and then fire anyone who refuses to bow. Psychopaths are adept at looking good and then bailing out before the house falls down around everyone else’s ears. Donald Trump is almost certainly a severe narcissist and likely a psychopath with delusions of grandeur, so they will eventually clash and Tillerson will depart. Tillerson is already said to have called the president a moron, not a phrase designed to preserve one’s job. If the Russian matter becomes any more serious, it will not be “eventually.”
During the few days this column is being written, the rumor is that Tillerson will shortly be replaced by Mike Pompeo, currently head of the CIA, and ideologue of the first water. I suspect that it will not take long for Pompeo, for all his mindless right-wing rigidity, to tire of pandering to Trump, either in the Oval Office or on the golf course, but that is pure speculation on my part.
Are cabinet members allowed to beat the president in golf?
Daniel Dreazner has written a scathing column on Tillerson: The sooner Rex Tillerson resigns as secretary of state, the better.
Diplomatic decisions usually have big consequences. At the present time North Korea is testing thermonuclear weapons and rocket platforms that are, or will shortly be, powerful enough to strike the U.S. mainland. This is a problem that has remained under the public radar for at least 17 years. Now that the efforts of the North Koreans is about to come to fruition, the U.S. is faced with a serious problem: what can we do to prevent the North Koreans from using their nuclear weapons against us?
It is becoming clear that Trump doesn’t believe in diplomacy, because his only response to unpleasant happenings throughout has been threats to use military force. His public remarks—intended to send a scary, belligerent message to North Korea—have not improved our relations or stopped the North Koreans from testing nuclear explosives or delivery systems.The Koreans are a proud people; threats only stiffen their resolve. They were once bombed to smithereens by the U.S. Air Force and they are not about to repeat the experience without inflicting all the harm they can upon their adversaries. They have observed that no nation possessing nuclear weapons has ever been attacked by the U.S. Nuclear weapons are an insurance policy to deter U. S. aggression.
Even when one is carrying a huge stick, it is usually wise to negotiate rather than to attack someone wielding a little stick big enough to injure. North Korea will soon have that little stick and it behooves our leadership to negotiate with the North Koreans and treat them with respect, something we should have been doing all along. Because the U.S. and North Korea have never enjoyed diplomatic relations with each other, neither state knows much about the other, and that situation is dangerous. It is essential in a nuclear standoff that each side reacts to the actions of the other in a predictable manner. Without that familiarity, there will arise situations in which one side misinterprets the actions of the other as preparations to attack. When each side must immediately fire its missiles after it confirms an attack, the danger of a misunderstanding turning into a nuclear exchange is high. During the Cold War, there were times that the only thing that prevented a war was the knowledge by one side that the scenario didn’t fit the overall situation revealed by their intelligence. Thus a false alarm did not become Armageddon because each side was familiar with its adversary.
An historical example of how ignorance can lead to disaster: During the McCarthy era, almost all the experts on the far East working in the State Department were driven from their jobs after being denounced as communists by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. Among these experts was John Paton Davies, who at that time was probably the world’s foremost expert on China. He was the subject of nine security investigations instigated by McCarthy and exonerated eight times. In 1954, the ninth case finally stuck. The result: he was discharged for “lack of judgment, discretion, and reliability.” John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State at that time, knuckling under pressure from a McCarthy-cowed, feckless, Republican congress, affirmed the decision. Davies was offered the opportunity to resign and avoid the stigma of having the finding remain on his record, but refused, because resigning was tantamount to an admission of guilt. Later Dulles quietly offered to write Davies a letter of recommendation if he needed one. Davies never requested one.[2] In mid–1968, Davies was cleared. He eventually took his family to Spain and washed his hands of the government that had betrayed him and then would not take him back after his name was cleared.
But even then the State Department did not have the courage to admit that it had corrected an old injustice. Instead of issuing an honest and candid statement, it leaked the news of the reinstatement to a reporter for the New York Times; the timidity still lived.[3]
Thus was the State Department (and the entire nation) deprived of the very man capable of advising the government from a position of depth and experience, a man who spoke the truth to power, no matter how unwelcome it might be to its listener. The nation was also deprived, thanks to McCarthy, of numerous others that would have also fearlessly spoken truth to power: John S. Service, John Carter Vincent, O. Edmund Clubb, Owen Lattimore, John K. Fairbank, Theodore White, Raymond P. Ludden, John F. Melby, and Edgar Snow. [4]
Without these public servants in the State Department, the executive branch was in a position to make some horrendous choices in the far east, most disastrously in its attempts to prevent a Communist takeover of South Vietnam, a pseudo-nation created by France and the U.S. and ruled by a clique of generals associated with the French efforts to retain their colony, known at the time as “Indochina,” which included all of Vietnam.
But I digress. Tillerson is blinding the government, pure and simple. Apparently, Trump is behind it all, although it is difficult to imagine that Trump would care about the State Department. But he is repeating the well-established script that politicians have followed since WWII. To Halberstam is attributed[5] the judgement on the patrician coterie that got us into the Vietnam quagmire, “They were brilliant and they were fools.” Unfortunately for them, the judgment of historians on Trump and his henchmen will be “They were ignorant and arrogant and the term ‘fools’ doesn’t even begin to describe the depths of their folly.”
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As an interesting aside, the armies of Islam that conquered the Middle East, the Balkans, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula in the 7th and 8th Centuries usually left the bureaucrats of the old regime in charge and replaced the nobles at the top with themselves. This was for the simple reason that there weren’t enough Moslems to take their places and the conquered lands could not be administered without someone performing those jobs. Tillerson seems to be following a radically different course in getting rid of the people that do much of the work. He may believe that they do not, and he may be leaving before the damage is apparent, but he is doing damage. ↩
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Halberstam, David, The Best and the Brightest, p.390 (1972). My account of Davies’s story is based on Halberstam’s book, pp. 379–92, esp. 389–390. ↩
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Ibid. p. 392 ↩
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China Hands, Wikepedia article, downloded 12/5/2017 ↩
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I have searched for the passage but have been unable to locate it. Any help would be appreciated. ↩
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