So the guy who’s getting paid to fly around the World, being the POTUS foreign affairs advisor and negotiating deals (treaties and agreements) plus a laundry list of other duties with foreign lands states in his first interview that he didn’t want the job; “I didn’t want this job. I didn’t seek this job.. My wife told me I’m supposed to do this.” – PB/TK
US diplomacy in crisis amid cuts and confusion at state department – Julian Borger 22 March 2017
The US state department is hosting a 68-nation meeting on Wednesday aimed at consolidating the international effort against Islamic State.
But the foreign ministers are convening in Washington at a time when the state department itself is under siege, facing swingeing budget cuts by a hostile White House, and led by a former oil executive who has said he did not want the job in the first place.
Rex Tillerson has billed the counter-Isis coalition meeting as a decisive moment “to set Isis on a lasting and irreversible path to defeat”. The secretary of state lambasted the Obama administration for its policy on Isis, claiming his predecessor never had a proper strategy to defeat the extremist movement.
“All that did was drag out the agony for everyone,” Tillerson told the Independent Journal Review (IJR), in his first interview since he surfaced in December as a surprise candidate for the role of secretary of state.
He said that the then president-elect, Donald Trump, had invited him to his transition headquarters in New York ostensibly to talk “about the world” and then stunned Tillerson, about to retire as head of ExxonMobil, by offering him the post of the nation’s top diplomat.
He said it was his wife who persuaded to accept the offer, telling him he was “supposed to do this”.
He made clear that the anti-Isis effort would be a priority for him and the defence secretary, James Mattis, who will also take part in Wednesday’s coalition meeting. A top Tillerson aide is quoted in the IJR article as saying the two men “get along like gin and vermouth”.
Over the course of the election campaign, Trump assured voters that he had a plan to defeat Isis, but never elaborated what that plan was. Tillerson and Mattis will seek to outline a strategy on Wednesday.
Continue to theguardian.com article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/22/us-diplomacy-in-crisis-amid-cuts-and-confusion-at-state-department
