US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (right) meets with 2017 Kennedy Center Honoree Lionel Richie
What do you do when you’re America’s top diplomat, fourth in line to the presidency, and the White House makes it publicly known you’re living on borrowed time? If you’re Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, you brush it off, pack a suitcase and hop a flight to Europe, as if nothing had happened.
Tillerson tours Europe this week under circumstances unparalleled in recent U.S. diplomatic memory. After months of public tensions with President Donald Trump and rumors about Tillerson’s future, the White House signaled last week he could be fired — and possibly soon. White House officials told multiple news organizations a plan was afoot to oust Tillerson and replace him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, a close Trump confidant.
“It’s laughable,” Tillerson quipped the next day, as aides insisted he was staying in his job.
“FAKE NEWS,” tweeted the president, saying Tillerson was “not leaving.”
Yet such damage to Tillerson’s standing is not so easily erased — certainly not by a single tweet.
In Belgium, Austria and France this week, Tillerson will contend with European officials who now have more reason than ever to question whether he truly speaks for the president, how much credence to give his policies, and if he’ll remain long enough to see them through. For foreign governments, it has created even more uncertainty over dealing with a mercurial administration in which the only voice that seems to matter is that of Trump himself.
Opening his first day in Brussels yesterday, Tillerson alluded to the growing doubt about his leadership of the State Department as he greeted diplomats at the U.S. embassy. He acknowledged that “we don’t have any wins yet” and said he’s getting “a little criticism” over the high number of vacancies in key roles — including, in Brussels, no U.S. ambassadors to either Belgium or the European Union.
Still, Tillerson insisted he was making progress on his top priority: a top-to-bottom overhaul of the State Department. He said there would be some “quick wins” coming shortly that he would discuss at town hall meetings about the overhaul he said he’d hold before year’s end.
“The State Department is not missing a beat,” Tillerson said.
In the Belgian capital, Tillerson planned to meet with the EU’s foreign policy chief and other regional diplomats before a conference of NATO foreign ministers. He’ll then fly today [Macau time] to Vienna for a conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, whose talks with Tillerson are always closely watched.
The former Exxon Mobil CEO will lastly go to Paris for a final round of meetings before returning to Washington. In each stop, key security issues related to Syria, North Korea, Lebanon and Iran are expected to be high on the agenda.
Though Trump insisted on Twitter that he and Tillerson “work well together,” he allowed news stories about Tillerson’s impending demise to percolate for more than 24 hours before pushing back. Trump’s spokeswoman didn’t explicitly dispute that a plan had been hatched to replace Tillerson. Nor did she declare outright Trump’s confidence in the Texas oil man. AP
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