Rex Tillerson is the CEO of Exxon Mobil, and is, as of this morning, Donald Trump's choice to be the next Secretary of State. Tillerson would succeed John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, meaning that the bar for success is incredibly low, given where the USA sits in terms of being unfeared by our enemies and untrusted by our friends after the last eight years. And, oh, yeah, the incomprehensibly bad Iran deal.
Mr. Tillerson is receiving unusually high scrutiny from the left and the press (but I repeat myself), as well as by some Republicans, like Sen. McCain of Arizona. This, surprisingly, has nothing to do with his tenure and track record at Exxon Mobil and lots to do with, as if we hadn't talked enough about them already, Russia.
You know as well as I. Mr. Tillerson has raised the eyebrows of his possible opposition because of the fact that he has done business with Russia, as might be expected when the largest energy company in the world deals with one of, if not the, leading energy-producing nations.
In the course of that business, Mr. Tillerson has developed a relationship with Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, that led to his having gotten some kind of award of friendship (the Russian "Order of Friendship") from Putin not long ago, in 2013. That, of course, gives raw meat to the left as they seek to de-legitimize Mr. Trump's position and fight him at every turn.
With "opposition" as their goal, and not the leadership of the country that they blew by nominating Hillary, this relationship has been characterized as fairly chummy. However, it is not presented -- and I've been listening -- as to how a preexisting, positive relationship between the Secretary of State and the leader of Russia is, a priori, a bad thing.
I confess to being willing to give Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt, in that this appointment is a "part of the whole" in the sense of his construction of a government. So I find myself asking why it might not be a good thing, long before I ask why it might be bad. But the left is already doing the latter.
And again, I cannot see how it might be bad.
Look, friends, we are not about to change Putin the man; he is still a murderer and an autocrat, and we can only seek to constrain his tendency to do things like invading his neighbors. In other words, Putin is a reality, and we need to accept that we must face him. We're not going to replace him; we simply need to get him to keep his troops at home and stop his cyber warfare campaign.
What people do not seem to get is that Donald Trump does not think like a politician. Politicians are concerned with how things look so they can get reelected; a businessman is concerned with getting things done. That means that if our goal is to get Putin to keep his troops at home and turn off the cyber warfare, and trust me, we're not going to be doing it by bombing Volgograd, then we need to do it through negotiation, which is the Trump version of what we used to call "diplomacy."
Diplomacy as practiced by the Obamists obviously doesn't work, since Russia is blithely invading its neighbors, practicing cyber warfare on us and meddling in the Middle East. And, by the way, they're also reading this column. Trump clearly believes that if we need to get this to stop, there has to be something in it for Putin.
If that's what he believes, then at least to the extent that dealing with Russia is a necessary part of our foreign policy, he needs to have the ability to deal directly with Putin. It would seem that to do that, a good start would be to have a Secretary of State that has a relationship with him and has worked with him on some kind of negotiating, positive level. To have that person be one with extensive negotiating experience throughout the world, including some of the ugliest places on earth, seems like a logical thing to me.
It is not logical to the left and the press (but I ...), but they're apparently unable to explain why it doesn't make perfect sense. Perhaps it does, but they're intent on simply opposing Trump by reflex. I, however, am willing to listen. The next time someone provides a good reason why a positive relationship with Putin is a bad thing, I'm listening. Happy to listen if you can explain it.
Absent that, I will come down on the side of friendship and negotiation as our diplomacy. Perhaps after eight years of abject failure on the world stage, trying something different is worth the effort.
All for it.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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