President Donald Trump sacked Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state on Tuesday, without directly speaking to him, and immediately named Mike Pompeo, the CIA director and a former Tea Party Republican congressman from Kansas, as Mr Tillerson’s replacement.
Gina Haspel, the CIA’s deputy director, is set to replace Mr Pompeo, becoming the first woman to head the agency.
Mr Trump fires aides with moderate views as he is determined to surround himself with loyalists willing to reflect his “America First” views. More changes are anticipated, including the potential departure of national security adviser H.R. McMaster.
Mr Tillerson’s departure came just hours after he strongly supported the British government’s case that Russia was behind the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent who was poisoned with a nerve agent in Britain last week – while the White House hedged about Moscow’s responsibility – and less than a week after Gary Cohn resigned as Mr Trump’s chief economic adviser after losing a White House battle over the president’s decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium imports.
Mr Tillerson represented the globalist wing in the Trump administration, taming the president’s protectionist and isolationist instincts, but he appeared unable to maintain a bond with his boss. He departed from the president’s policies on North Korea, the Paris climate accord, which calls for every country in the world to prepare plans to cut emissions that contribute to warming (he wanted to remain in the Paris accord, Mr Trump decided to leave it), the Iran nuclear deal (he believed that the US shouldn’t walk away from the agreement) and urged the president not to back Saudi Arabia’s campaign against Qatar. He also distanced himself from the president’s equivocating remarks on the white supremacists who protested in Charlottesville last August.
Mr Tillerson was uneasy with Jared Kushner’s role in the Middle East peace process, as Mr Trump’s 37-year-old son-in-law and his senior adviser doesn’t have experience to negotiate complex Middle East issues.
On one occasion Mr Trump accused his secretary of state of “wasting his time” for advocating negotiations with North Korea. Mr Tillerson, for his part, was reported to have called the president a “fucking moron” in a private meeting, a claim he never directly denied.
Mr Trump agreed earlier this month to meet Kim Jong-un, the North Korean supreme leader, within weeks. The decision was made without consulting Mr Tillerson, even though the US chief diplomat was the one who had long been arguing for opening up a diplomatic channel to Pyongyang.
Mr Tillerson, however, presided over the evisceration of the US diplomatic corps, losing skilled professionals with expertise, and publicly championed Mr Trump’s call to cut the state department’s budget by a third.
Mr Pompeo, who comes from a military background, is among the harshest critics of the 2015 nuclear agreement that world powers brokered with Iran, sharing the president’s views on deal (Mr Trump loathes the Iran nuclear agreement as an embarrassment to the US). He has also been publicly sceptical that human activities are largely responsible for the atmosphere’s warming. As director of the CIA, he said he believed intelligence assessments that Russia was behind the effort to influence the 2016 elections.
Mr Pompeo’s nomination for secretary of state comes at a time when the administration is preparing for high-stakes talks between Mr Trump and Mr Kim and two months before Mr Trump faces his next deadline to decide whether to reimpose sanctions on Iran.
Mr Tillerson’s departure has added to fears that if the Trump-Kim meeting fails, the US will lurch closer towards a military conflict with the North Korean regime.
State Department photo/ Public Domain
