To say that Rex Tillerson was unloved in Foggy Bottom would be an understatement. So it follows that the emotions surrounding his departure and the arrival of Mike Pompeo are complicated. There is a “debate over whether to be gleeful or apprehensive,” one senior State staffer said of the new boss, a conservative culture warrior and fierce Donald Trump ally who accused Hillary Clinton of covering up the Benghazi attacks. Tillerson inspired little confidence during his tumultuous 14-month tenure, during which he oversaw the rapid depletion of the diplomatic ranks, was sidelined by Trump, and poured his energies into an ambitious, morale-crushing overhaul of the 75,000-person agency. Pompeo will re-invest his position with some of the authority that Tillerson lost. “Having a [secretary of state] who has the confidence of the president and an established relationship with the president will surely be good,” said one former State Department official.

With a change in management, however, exasperation has been replaced with apprehension that Pompeo, a former Army officer, will prove even more antagonistic towards the principle of diplomacy than his predecessor. If Tillerson’s leadership style was “benign neglect,” as one current State staffer characterized it, Pompeo is feared to be “more calculating and more destructive.” In particular, there is a fear among insiders that Pompeo will usher in a new era of hard-power diplomacy, defined by zero-sum negotiations and the further isolation of the U.S. on the world stage. As C.I.A. director, Pompeo was known to infuse his speeches with policy far more often than his predecessors, frequently staking out hawkish positions that will be at odds with the diplomatic corp he will now lead. He has been a fierce critic of the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal, writing on Twitter shortly after Trump’s election, “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.” On North Korea, too, Pompeo has taken a hard line, advocating for regime change in Pyongyang. Tillerson, for all his faults, was “a business person,” pragmatic, and “not particularly ideological,” the staffer told me. “I think Pompeo has very set views and has absolutely an ideological way that he views the world.”

More chilling, for an agency that has chafed at the president’s views on global affairs, is the prospect that Pompeo’s leadership will reflect his bromance with Trump. “It is not so much hawkish versus dovish as much as it is someone who is willing to stand up to Trump and be independent and run the department and execute American foreign policy on more than just Trump’s whim,” a Senate aide told me. “Even those senators who didn’t support Tillerson’s confirmation, I think, to a very large degree, respected his obvious willingness to argue with the president and stand up for what he believes in.” Those incidents eroded Tillerson’s authority under Trump, making his position untenable. Under Pompeo, however, staffers are bracing for the opposite problem: a boss who won’t say no. “It is abundantly clear that the way to ingratiate yourself with the president is not by doing your job well, but by sucking up to him and doing what he says and agreeing with him,” the aide said. “I think the concern is that Pompeo has put himself in this position by telling the president that he was right all the time, and feeding some of the president’s more drastic and aggressive impulses.”

Thomas Hill, a former senior staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee now at the Brookings Institution, echoed the sentiment. “Pompeo is a pleaser—a Trump pleaser. The reason why Trump likes him is because he’s kind of a sycophant. He’s not going to come in and immediately stand up to Trump,” Hill told me. “It would be antithetical to the relationship that Pompeo has with Trump, right? The relationship is based on Pompeo saying yes. Pompeo coming in and going, ‘No, that’s all wrong’—it’s definitely not in the cards.”

Pompeo’s bond with Trump, forged during his frequent visits to the Oval Office to deliver the President’s Daily Brief, is seen by many as his greatest selling point. Tillerson and his staff were cut out of the loop on North Korea, in part, because Tillerson couldn’t play the game. “He’s not a political figure. He had no interest in infighting with Jared Kushner or Steve Bannon in the early days, or any of those people, to try to get his agenda forward,” Ian Bremmer, the founder and president of the Eurasia Group, told me. Pompeo “is much more of an operator politically. He’s got sharp elbows. He’ll get in the key meetings . . . make sure that resources go his way, that positions get filled.”