Tillerson's struggles show the risk of a president and secretary of state with no gov't experience

[DonViejo]

Rex Tillerson’s struggles show the risk of a president and secretary of state with no government experience

By James Hohmann January 12 at 10:33 AM

THE BIG IDEA: For the first time in American history, both the president and the nation’s chief diplomat are poised to have no prior government, military or legislative experience. This is a recipe for trouble. Rex Tillerson’s shaky performance yesterday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee underscored why.

The world was already a tinderbox, and Donald Trump has only contributed to the instability in the two months since he won the election. Russia, which got the outcome it wanted, is emboldened. China is on the march. Democracy is in retreat. The already-wobbly western alliance is in danger.

ExxonMobil’s market capitalization is larger than the GDP of many countries, and Tillerson has negotiated many ten-figure deals with foreign leaders. But shuttle diplomacy, grand strategy and the federal government’s mazelike bureaucracy are very different beasts.

Trump clearly believes that business experience tops government or legislative experience. Maybe he’ll be proven right. But kings of the C-suite always have less experience getting challenged, attacked and criticized in public than they think when they try to enter the political arena. Which is why Tillerson let himself get repeatedly rattled and, as a nine-hour hearing dragged on, pulled into unnecessary squabbles with senators, including one in his own party.

It all added up to a pretty bad first impression for the 64-year-old Texan. If he didn’t fully grasp how different senators are than shareholders, he learned it the hard way.

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[Xipe Totec]

1. Welcome to the Biglies nt

[Initech]

2. And Tillerson would be third in line for the presidency.

[moondust]

3. And no morals.

Profits don't care 'bout no damn human rights or civil liberties or war crimes or nuthin like that. "What's a war criminal?"

Your buddy Vlad is a war criminal--a very, very wealthy one.

[karynnj]

4. I like that this issue is being brought up. Much as the right diminishes "career politicians", the

skill set that makes a good legislator is likely closer to that needed for a secretary to succeed than executive experience.

For a legislator to succeed, he/she must learn to understand the positions of every peer and work to find the common ground - sometimes infinitesimally small - where they could create legislation that wins over enough votes to pass in both Houses and be signed by the President. Many have spoken of the importance of good personal relations. No Senator, even the majority leader, has the authority of a corporate CEO to say - "just do it" and expect it to happen. So, while a CEO is likely intelligent, creative, (and assuming he was not born to that position - as Trump was) politically capable, they might not be dealing with that many peers.

If you take the Paris Climate Accord, you can see that the many years that Kerry spent working on this issue in the Senate were key in getting there. He had been the only Senator at the Bali conference in 2007 and one thing he did there was he spent a lot of time with the Chinese and Indian delegates and he was one of the people who pushed the idea of differentiated goals for different countries. (In fact in House and Senate hearings, it was unusual to here the Bush administration people thanking Kerry (in the SFRC) and praising his help in the House hearing. Ban Ki Moon, when the Paris Accord passed, noted that its roots were in the Bali conference.

More importantly, Kerry used his personal relationship with the Chinese negotiators on this in a meeting within a month of becoming the Secretary of State. That meeting, followed by a lot of work on the details, led to the US/China pact. That energized the effort Kerry was already making of bringing up this issue in every place he went. The Lima conference, for which there were very no expectations before the US/China pact, led to other countries agreeing to goals. That led to the successful Paris conference. (This may sound US centric - after all Europe has done far more on fighting climate change for decades and is more progressive. However the failure in Copenhagen was that the US AND the countries like China and India were not on board. That changed in Paris - because the Accord was built within the constraints of what the US (without a prayer of the Senate ratifying anything) and the other countries would commit to.

It is easy to see how Kerry's skill working to pull more and more people to cosponsor bills he introduced helped him in being able to get foreign diplomats to agree that it was in their own country's interest to find a way to be part of this effort. Interestingly, I heard Tillerson (and Trump)speaking of how he needs to "repair the damage" in our relations with the rest of the world. Ignored is that nearly 200 nations signed on to the Climate Accord and over a hundred have ratified it. The entire Security Council backed the Iran Nuclear Deal, there are 68 countries in the anti ISIS coalition. Even on Syria, which is a mess, the US led the effort to pull Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia together to support the UN resolution that will hopefully be used as the framework to internationally sponsored peace and reconciliation talks.

Kerry has been showered with international recognition in the last half year - including the Tipperary (Ireland) peace prize, the Chatham House (UK) award, the German Cross, the French Legion of Honor -- all citing his extraordinary work. This does not sound like the US reputation needing repair. (In fact, the only negative factor in most places is that Trump is the incoming President.)

A good question that was never asked of Trump or Tillerson is to identify international agreements with this many countries in support that some other country led on. The US organized more countries to sanction Russia than Putin has found to support him. As to Netanyahu, the other right wing favorite, all of the OTHER security council nations voted FOR the resolution against settlements.