Mr. Tillerson, a former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, has made no secret of his belief that the State Department is a bloated bureaucracy and that he regards much of the day-to-day diplomacy that lower-level officials conduct as unproductive. Even before Mr. Tillerson was confirmed, his staff fired six of the State Department’s top career […]
The fact that Tillerson chose to focus on the bilateral relationship with India as the lynchpin to peace and prosperity across the Indo-Pacific region is highly significant. By recognizing India’s role in a larger strategy to promote “rule of law, freedom of navigation, universal values, and free trade,” Tillerson put forward what the Trump administration […]
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will arrive in Beijing this week with a full agenda, in the midst of an escalating crisis over North Korea’s nuclear and missile weapons development and Sino-US trade tensions. The diplomat’s second official visit to China will take place from Thursday to Sunday and pave the way for US President […]
Watching Tillerson’s first six months, one wonders whether Trump picked him as a way to diminish the State Department, similar to how Richard Nixon chose William Rogers for the express purpose of ensuring that the department remained weak. As Henry Kissinger recalled of Rogers, “few secretaries of state can have been selected because of their president’s confidence […]
Veterans of the U.S. diplomatic corps say the expanding front office is part of an unprecedented assault on the State Department: A hostile White House is slashing its budget, the rank and file are cut off from a detached leader, and morale has plunged to historic lows. They say President Donald Trump and his administration […]
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson offered perhaps the most comprehensive roadmap of U.S. foreign policy, addressing the nation’s involvement with East Asia, Russia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere. Read Here – The Atlantic
In the sort of diplomacy that Tillerson must conduct now, secret talks certainly have their place; for example, in forging breakthroughs like President Nixon’s opening to China or President Obama’s to Cuba. More routinely, however, diplomatic success requires using interviews, press conferences, social media, and speeches to address and shape public and legislative opinion simultaneously […]
Despite murmurs of prospect clashes between the world’s two trade giants, drumbeats for a China-U.S. trade war are increasingly muted when both sides underscore closer win-win economic cooperation. As the new administration of the United States sent its first cabinet-level official to China for a visit, the messenger echoed a sequence of rapport-building gestures made […]
Rex Tillerson has been confirmed as America’s new secretary of state, in a 56-43 vote that fell basically along party lines. Every Republican and four Democrats voted for him. With Tillerson’s nomination in the bag, then, the most important question becomes what he’ll do with his new post. The answer? Nobody actually knows. Read Here […]
Make no mistake: American foreign policy has indeed failed. It failed to prevent the rise of a peer competitor such as China, failed to entrench democracy in Arab and Latin American transition societies, and failed to integrate regional powers such as Russia and Iran into a liberal order. Barack Obama came into office seeking to […]
looking beyond borders 