Photo by Jim Mattis | CC BY 2.0
United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is the leading diplomat of the U.S. government. Tillerson, who was previously the head of Exxon, leads a department that nominally directs the country’s foreign policy. However, his tenure so far has been difficult. He serves a mercurial President, Donald Trump, who makes policy in the early hours of the morning on Twitter and zigzags on the basis of his “chemistry” with world leaders. Harsh words for someone today are transformed into kind words tomorrow.
How Tillerson is expected to form a sustained policy on the basis of these pronouncements is hard to imagine. Even harder to imagine is how Tillerson is running a department where over 200 crucial posts remain empty. There is no movement by this administration to fill these posts, including for that of Tillerson’s deputy. For now, career officials and people nominated by former President Barack Obama remain at their desks. But these people do not have the temperament to serve Trump. Their sensibility is antithetical to his.
American diplomacy has been a weak instrument of statecraft for many decades already. It is not merely an outgrowth of the general problems of Trump’s administrative attitude. Trump’s adviser, Steve Bannon, threatened the “deconstruction of the administrative state”. However, this “deconstruction” had already been going on under previous administrations. A series of reports from 2009, in the first year…