Washington (AFP) – Former ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson will this week take charge of a US State Department simmering with opposition to President Donald Trump’s refugee and travel ban.
The 64-year-old oilman’s nomination was confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday, clearing the way for the political newcomer to be sworn in as Washington’s top diplomat.
He will take over a department already rattled by senior-level resignations and by Trump’s order suspending refugee arrivals and visas for citizens from some Muslim countries.
On Tuesday, around 1,000 officials from US missions across the globe submitted a “dissent cable” through an official channel, decrying Trump’s ban as an affront to American values.
The State Department “dissent channel” has existed since the era of the Vietnam War to allow diplomats to question official policy, but the scale of the protest is unprecedented.
One official, speaking to AFP condition of anonymity, warned a bureaucratic “insurgency” against Trump is getting under way. Others spoke of colleagues bursting into tears.
Tillerson has not made his views known on Trump’s executive order, but the White House’s response was uncompromising.
Trump’s spokesman Sean Spicer said the travel restrictions would help weed out extremists and keep America safe.
The dissident diplomats, Spicer declared, “should either get with the program or they can go.”
His threat outraged many at the State Department, who argue that their in-house experts should have been consulted before the order was signed.
– Amateur policy –
Thomas Countryman, a 35-year veteran career diplomat who retired on Monday as an assistant secretary of state, urged Tillerson to promise to protect his new employees from retribution.
“If you don’t trust professional public servants to help you on foreign policy then by definition you end up with an amateur foreign policy,” he told MSNBC news.
Tillerson, who had lunch with Trump on Wednesday as senators gathered to approve his confirmation, comes into office after a decade as Exxon’s CEO and with an impressive reputation.
Having led his firm for a decade, he certainly has experience managing large international organizations. ExxonMobil has been compared to a quasi-state with its own policy.
It is the world’s largest publicly-traded energy firm — a $350 billion corporation with revenue last year of $226 billion, operations worldwide and more than 70,000 employees.
The US State Department has an annual budget of only $65 billion and employs 13,000 diplomats, 11,000 civil servants and 45,000 local staff at 270 missions worldwide.
At Exxon, Tillerson was the ultimate insider. He joined the firm in 1975 as a young engineer straight out of college and worked the way up the ranks to the top.
At the State Department, by contrast, he will come in as an outsider with no political or diplomatic experience.
But that is not to say he has no experience of high stakes international negotiations.
ExxonMobil has operations in dozens of countries, under multi-year contracts with a variety of governments, and Tillerson was at the heart of many of the deals.
As the director of Exxon Neftegas, a Bahamas-registered consortium set up to exploit offshore oil and gas in the Russian far east, he built close ties to the Kremlin.
So close was he to President Vladimir Putin that in 2013 Tillerson received Russia’s “Order of Friendship.”
This has raised eyebrows in Washington, where lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have questioned why, under Tillerson’s leadership, Exxon lobbied against sanctions on Russia.
– To be sworn in –
Trump has said he too hopes to form a friendship with Russia, and US allies are concerned that he and Tillerson might halt measures taken to punish the Kremlin’s intervention in Ukraine.
This led to some combative moments in his confirmation hearing but the Senate voted by 56 votes to 43 to approve Tillerson, with even anti-Russian hawks like John McCain on board.
Tillerson is expected to be sworn in to office on Thursday and arrive at the State Department on Friday. His first meeting may be with German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel.
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