WASHINGTON — When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson traveled to Saudi Arabia with President Donald Trump last spring, he impressed hosts and visitors alike by swaying along with the traditional men’s dancers swathed in white robes and brandishing swords. “Not my first sword dance,” Tillerson deadpanned afterward.
Indeed, the calculation behind Tillerson’s appointment was that he could parlay decades of experience as an oil executive brokering deals in the Middle East and elsewhere into success in the nation’s top diplomatic post. But as Tillerson has discovered, the most important target of any secretary of state’s diplomacy is the president he serves.
Now the man brandishing the sword is Trump, who holds it over Tillerson’s neck, poised to swing at any moment. The relationship between the two men has grown so acidic that Tillerson felt compelled to call an extraordinary news conference on Wednesday to deny that he was thinking of resigning — a move that paradoxically only increased speculation that he might in fact resign, of his own free will or not.
Even if he stays, Tillerson is now a wounded figure, his credibility at home and abroad diminished by the perception that he does not have a close alignment with the president. Foreign leaders and diplomats may doubt that he truly represents the administration or that his assurances will stick. A countdown clock has been set, ticking away toward what many assume is the inevitable departure.
“Tillerson has good instincts on many foreign policy issues and is ready to provide independent advice,” said Aaron David Miller, a longtime State Department peace negotiator now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “Despite Tillerson’s efforts to project the fact that it’s all one big happy family, however, the road ahead with a president who consistently undercuts him publicly won’t be easy.”
Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who served in several national security positions under President George W. Bush, said Trump has made clear that staying on the same page as his top advisers is not a priority. In some cases, he said, that may provide value in forging a “good cop, bad cop” strategy that gives Tillerson leverage to demand more in negotiations with other countries.
“But most of the work of government must be carried out by subordinates, not by the president himself,” said Doran. “So it’s hard to see how an approach that erodes the authority of top advisers will pay off in the long run.”
Still, while many in Washington point to Trump’s divisive management style, Tillerson has little reservoir of good will left in the capital. He was already judged “the nation’s least influential top diplomat in recent memory,” as Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, the conservative journal, put it. He has alienated his own department with deep budget cuts and a diffident style while never bringing in a full team of his own. He has made few friends in Congress or the foreign policy establishment. He has maintained such a low profile that his clout was doubted from the start.
Some see him as a brake on an undisciplined president eager to tear down international relationships, part of a “grown ups” triumvirate along with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff. Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, cast Tillerson as one of those standing between the United States and “chaos.”
But other than Corker, few rushed to Tillerson’s defense in recent days, reflecting a larger disappointment with him.
Tillerson was an unconventional choice for the job in the first place. While he spent 41 years at Exxon Mobil, working his way up to chief executive of the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company, he was the first secretary of state in American history without prior experience in government, politics or the military, working for the nation’s first president also without such a background.
No matter how often successful business leaders like Tillerson assume they can master the public sector just as they did the private sector, government rarely submits to the will of the new master. At Exxon Mobil, Tillerson was the undisputed chief whose orders were not to be ignored and who had no need to engage the public if he chose not to. After 10 years running one of the largest companies on the planet, he was unaccustomed to the role of subordinate. And Trump does not make it easy for anyone to make that transition.
The most successful secretaries of state were those with close working relationships with their presidents, like Dean Acheson under Harry Truman, John Foster Dulles under Dwight D. Eisenhower, Henry A. Kissinger under Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, and George P. Shultz under Ronald Reagan. Condoleezza Rice was so close to Bush that she was seen as the most influential member of the administration in his second term.
“The ideal situation is where there is a direct and close relationship with the president whereby the secretary of state is seen as the primary spokesperson of the president and the administration on foreign policy,” said Edward P. Djerejian, a longtime diplomat and director of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “This means the president has to empower the secretary of state in this role.”
No secretary of state was as close to his president as James A. Baker III, who had been a personal friend of the elder George Bush for decades since their days as tennis doubles partners at the Houston Country Club. “Nobody was going to get between me and my president,” Baker said repeatedly.
Other secretaries who could not reconcile themselves with their presidents did not fare as well. William Jennings Bryan quit in protest of Woodrow Wilson’s policies leading to entry in World War I, while Cyrus Vance resigned in protest of Jimmy Carter’s decision to mount what was ultimately a failed military operation to rescue American hostages in Iran. Colin L. Powell was boxed out by rivals under the younger Bush and left unhappily. John Kerry was not close to Barack Obama but ultimately won support from his president for his Iran nuclear deal.
Probably the most disastrous relationship between a president and secretary of state in modern times came when Reagan named Alexander Haig to the post in 1981. Friction started on Inauguration Day when Haig, still wearing a morning coat from the ceremony, strode into the Oval Office with an order he wanted Reagan to sign granting him sweeping authority. Reagan declined and friction only grew. Haig threatened to resign repeatedly until one day, to his surprise, Reagan accepted.
At his news conference on Wednesday, Tillerson expressed bafflement at the ways of the capital, in particular when pressed over reports he had derided Trump as a “moron.”
“This is what I don’t understand about Washington,” he said. “I’m not from this place. But the places I come from, we don’t deal with that kind of petty nonsense. And it is intended to do nothing but divide people.”
Tillerson did not deny using the word “moron” to describe Trump, although his spokeswoman later did on his behalf. Inside the White House, many discounted that denial and assumed that he did in fact say it.
Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia history professor who was Rice’s counselor at the State Department, said foreign governments have already taken their measure of Trump and Tillerson. “The impact,” he said, “is likely to be more internal, within the administration, adding that much more acid to the corrosive drip.”
Sword dancing, as it turns out, can be hazardous to one’s health.
