The new US secretary of state needs to win over a disgruntled staff before soothing allies alienated by Trump’s chaotic administration

Every new US secretary of state comes to the office at Foggy Bottom to find a full in-tray waiting, but Rex Tillerson will find his overflowing on Thursday with looming new crises created in the first two weeks of his own administration.



Tillerson was 45 minutes late at his first day of work because the annual presidential prayer breakfast had overrun. It seems that this year, he explained, “people felt the need to pray a little longer”. The line was met with a knowing laugh from the staff gathered in the state department’s C Street lobby.

In the time it has taken for the former ExxonMobil executive to get his Senate confirmation, Donald Trump has alienated allies in the Arab and Islamic world with his refugee ban, setting off a wave of dissent from more than a thousand US diplomats, whom the White House then angered further by inviting them to leave their jobs.

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The president has provoked a diplomatic storm with Mexico, apparently threatening to send US troops over the border, which led that country’s president to cancel a planned visit. The new US ambassador to the UN has drawn derision for threatening she would be “taking names” of countries that did not support US proposals. The administration green-lighted a special forces raid in Yemen that went horribly wrong. On Wednesday alone, the national security adviser, Michael Flynn, set nerves on edge in the Gulf by sabre-rattling at Iran, and Trump gratuitously insulted the leader of one of Washington’s staunchest allies, Australia.

Apart from that, it has been plain sailing.

As he sits down at his desk for the first time, Tillerson could be forgiven for wondering whether the post is quite as was advertised in December when he emerged as Trump’s surprise, untested nominee.

For one thing, the leadership level on the seventh floor of the department will be eerily quiet since a string of the most senior career officials were told to pack their bags on Wednesday last week. Such an exodus is not unusual for a change of administration, particularly when there is a change of party. What is unusual is that the Trump team has not yet nominated replacements. As senior state department officials take months to get vetted and confirmed, the former chief executive will have to work with a significant hole in his administration for quite some time. It will not be like running ExxonMobil.

Tillerson’s introductory speech to the assembled staff on Thursday was aimed at calming them without picking a first-day fight with the White House. He did not explicitly guarantee the protection of those diplomats and officials who used the department’s dissent channel to complain about the refugee ban and were told by Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, to “get with the program” or get out. But in laying down the principles he wanted to run the department on, he made a point of mentioning honesty and mutual respect.

“I know this was a hotly contested election and we do not all feel the same way about the outcome,” Tillerson said. “Each of us is entitled to political beliefs but we cannot let our personal convictions overwhelm our ability to work as one team.”

The third principle Tillerson spoke of was accountability and he made it clear that organisational change was coming to the state department.

“Change for the sake of change can be counterproductive but that will never be my approach. But we cannot sustain ineffective traditions over optimal outcomes,” he told his new staff. The vocabulary came from the corporate world, and it was largely a CEO’s speech, with little lofty rhetoric about ideals, something that had been the trademark of his predecessor, John Kerry.



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Tillerson will now face all the same intractable global crises that Kerry did, but from within an administration that is far more erratic and combustible than Barack Obama’s was. Only when he has put out the home fires will he be able to focus on the various blazes the White House has ignited before his arrival, and he will have to wonder whether the ideological, self-styled disruptors around Trump, such as Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, set those fires deliberately before his confirmation and before he could try to moderate the administration’s tone abroad.

After the Oval Office swearing-in ceremony on Wednesday night, Trump said Tillerson would understand “the importance of strengthening our alliances and forming new alliances to enhance our strategic interests and the safety of our people”. That is certainly the impression the 64-year-old Texan gave at his confirmation hearings. But the president himself clearly sets little store by old alliances. He seems far less enthusiastic about Nato than his secretary of defence.

Collisions on policy are inevitable in this administration and are likely to happen early. Tillerson will only discover how much real say he has on foreign policy when he attends his first meeting of the national security principals, where Bannon, the disruptor-in-chief and emerging dominant power behind the throne, has been given a permanent seat.

The Texas oilman, with not a day’s previous government experience, will face gargantuan challenges around the world in the months to come, but some of his biggest and earliest battles will be in Washington.