By Jonathan S. Tobin
Friday, June 30, 2017
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson doesn’t seem to enjoy
being America’s top diplomat. He finds himself isolated in Foggy Bottom and not
getting much love or cooperation from the White House. President Donald Trump
often contradicts Tillerson’s statements on major issues, like the dustup
between the Saudis and Qatar, in such a way as to indicate that Tillerson
doesn’t have much influence over U.S. policy.
Trump’s choice for the far less important post of
ambassador to the United Nations seems to be having a much better time. Nikki
Haley is speaking out frequently on issues such as human rights, Israel, Iran,
and Syria in ways that make it clear that, like some of her predecessors, she
understands that the U.N. post is the ideal bully pulpit. In an administration
in which the country’s putative top diplomat is struggling to manage his
department rather than advocating for U.S. values, Haley has become a kind of
alternative secretary of state.
There is a long history of tension and contrasts between
the occupants of these two offices. But thanks to the huge disparity in power,
probably never before has there been a duo in which the U.N. ambassador appears
to have the louder voice. While it’s difficult to say what the long-term
implications of this will be, the length of Tillerson’s tenure in office is an
open question, while Haley’s promising political career — which might have come
to an end after she resigned as governor of South Carolina to join the
administration of a man she had bitterly opposed during the Republican
primaries — seems to have gotten a new lease on life.
Tillerson’s transition from the business world to the
State Department has been rocky. Promised autonomy by Trump, the former Exxon
CEO has discovered that the White House still has the right to veto every
appointment he wants to make. When he recently lost his temper in a meeting
over the issue in the White House, he discovered that the inhabitants of the
West Wing are always going to leak embarrassing details about someone crossing
them in that fashion. Unflattering articles about the dysfunctional nature of
his department and his inability to influence the president’s decisions have
proliferated.
That’s particularly unfortunate because Tillerson is not
the kind of secretary of state who can rise above the organizational politics
of Foggy Bottom or tense relations with the West Wing by concentrating on
diplomatic initiatives. Tillerson is a manager by trade, not a diplomat, let
alone an advocate of a particular point of view about the world. Trump could
have had the conservative equivalent of a John Kerry by appointing any one of a
number of other possible candidates, including Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani,
and John Bolton. Instead he chose someone with no political or diplomatic experience.
Trump seems to have assumed that Tillerson would run his department more
efficiently than a politician or diplomat would, and that his active
participation in the global marketplace would serve him well when seeking to
make the brilliant deals Trump assumed his administration would make with
friends and foes.
Tillerson was an effective CEO, but his considerable
skills do not seem to translate well to the intensely political nature of his
job. He’s accused of not understanding that Trump and his team get to control
staffing while also cutting himself off from the career Foreign Service
officers who know how the department and international diplomacy work.
By contrast, Haley’s appointment didn’t seem to be based
on any notion that she could accomplish a thing. Putting her at the U.N. was a
minimalist effort to throw a bone to the Never Trump wing of the Republican
party. A stern critic of Trump during the campaign who was humiliated by the
billionaire’s landslide win in South Carolina, Haley may have expected a job
that her experience as governor of a small, mostly rural state might have
prepared her to do. It was unclear whether she actually knew anything about the
subject of foreign policy.
But despite her apparent lack of preparation, her
transition has gone smoothly. Though diplomatic veterans scoff at her willingness
to echo Trump’s belief that it is in America’s interests for the world to view
it as an unpredictable force, Haley understands that her purpose is not to
curry favor with the foreign-policy establishment, let alone with the
representatives of other nations. Taking former U.N. ambassadors such as Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Bolton as her role models, Haley has
made herself right at home in Turtle Bay speaking out fearlessly on a range of
issues in ways that have earned her rave reviews from Republicans, as well as
some media outlets that have little good to say about Trump, while earning the
resentment of traditional American foes.
In contrast to Tillerson, who has gone out of his way to
eschew the traditional role of diplomatic spokesman for the nation that leads
the free world, in the last six months Haley has become the leading American
voice for human rights and against tyranny. Where he has insisted that human
rights should not be a prime motive for U.S. foreign policy, they are a
priority for Haley. He seems to embody the notion that the purpose of the State
Department is to manage a complex world rather than to try to change it. She is
someone who is prepared to publicly pressure corrupt and ineffective U.N.
agencies such as the Human Rights Council for their hypocrisy and anti-Semitism
while reaffirming the U.S. alliance with Israel in a way that is normally the
business of the secretary of state.
Even more interesting is that Haley has been a particular
critic of Russia’s toxic role in fomenting trouble around the world. Where
Tillerson is largely silent about the atrocities committed by Russia and its
Iranian and Assad-government allies, Haley is their most outspoken
administration critic.
That ought to have gotten her in trouble with a president
who still seems to cling to the illusion that a rapprochement with Moscow is
possible. But so far Trump is either ignoring her heresy or perhaps encouraging
it because he understands the value of having a strong administration voice
playing the role of bad cop with the Putin regime.
But the result of all this is something that few could
have foreseen when Tillerson and Haley were appointed. While Tillerson is
increasingly isolated and lacking influence, Haley has become one of the few
clear successes in the Trump cabinet.
There’s no way of knowing whether Tillerson will
eventually regain his balance and run the State Department effectively, or
whether Haley’s outspokenness will eventually trip her up and cause Trump to
dump her in a fit of jealousy or zeal to appease Russia. But as of now, Haley
is the person to listen to if you want to hear talk about American values and
interests, while Tillerson fumes in private about his feuds with Trump’s aides.
That doesn’t make her the unofficial secretary of state, but it does speak to
Haley’s political savvy and eloquence, which will ensure this isn’t her last
stop in public service.
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