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United States

The case for optimism in Tillerson’s State Department

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Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, will win confirmation today as the next US secretary of state.

He stumbled and mumbled in a Texas drawl through hours of cringe-worthy hearings before the US Senate’s foreign relations committee.

He refused to label Russian president Vladimir Putin a ‘war criminal,’ and he dissembled about human rights abuses when asked about the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte or about Saudi Arabia. Moreover, at times, Tillerson seemed to distance himself from Trump when he failed to commit to pull out of Iran’s nuclear deal, and Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who lost the Republican nomination to Trump last year, lectured Tillerson on human rights in Russia, Syria and around the world.

Nevertheless, former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson easily won confirmation yesterday by the full Senate, and he will succeed John Kerry as the next US secretary of state, despite the earlier misgivings of Rubio and several other hawkish Republican senators.

Say what you want about Tillerson, he’s never — to my knowledge — joked about an impending US invasion with the sitting Mexican president into Mexico to get the ‘bad hombres’ or hung up on the Australian prime minister after a wholly unprofessional rant about winning the election and trying to welch out of a prior US agreement.

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RELATED: Tillerson’s not a bad choice for State,
he’s just a bad choice for Trump’s administration

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But perhaps the most interesting thing about Tillerson’s nomination was that US president Donald Trump ultimately selected Tillerson and not Lee Raymond, Tillerson’s predecessor as ExxonMobil CEO. As between the two, Raymond is far more ‘Trumpier.’  He routinely denied either that climate change is man-made or that climate change is, in fact, occurring. Raymond presided over the massive efforts after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill to improve the company’s safety record, and he successfully merged his company with Mobil. But he routinely flouted SEC rules on counting oil reserves and he also presided over a human rights fiasco in Aceh, then a separatist province in Indonesia.

By all rights, Raymond was always the alpha male to Tillerson’s beta male. After taking over the reins of ExxonMobil in 2005, Tillerson promptly acknowledged that climate change is a real threat and, after the Democratic Party took control of both the US congress and the presidency in 2009, even advocated for a carbon tax (instead of the more complicated, if more popular cap-and-trade legislation).

There’s no doubt that Raymond is exactly the kind of personality that Trump respects, and Raymond — even, one suspects, at the age of 78 — would have gone into Foggy Bottom ready to disrupt. By contrast, Tillerson is a life-long Texan Boy Scout and quintessential company man who spent his entire four-decade career at Exxon. While there are real doubts about whether Tillerson will succeed, one of the biggest is whether he can shift, after so many years, to such a very different role and such a very different bureaucracy.

In a more ‘normal’ Republican administration, under Rubio or Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or John Kasich, Tillerson might be a refreshing choice at State. Instead, the Trump administration’s inexperience and Trump’s odd conciliatory relationship with Putin have only highlighted Tillerson’s own lack of diplomatic experience and Russia ties.  More than any other administration in recent memory, the Trump administration is full of government outsiders with scant experience inside the executive branch. That’s true for Trump, but it is also true for the chief of staff Reince Preibus, for chief strategist Stephen Bannon, for national security adviser Mike Flynn. So another worry is Tillerson he might simply fade alongside so many other forceful personalities, including Trump himself, Flynn, Bannon and others.

That’s not to say Tillerson isn’t bright or capable. It’s clear, above all from Steve Coll’s indispensable 2012 book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, just how knowledgeable and effective Tillerson was in negotiations around the world. At Exxon, Tillerson pursued a foreign policy designed to help his company’s interests and his shareholders, and that didn’t always line up with the interests of the US government’s foreign policy, most notably as his company chafed at economic sanctions in recent years against Russia. On at least two occasions, ExxonMobil got the better of Venezuela under Tillerson’s leadership, and Tillerson effectively sidelined the central Iraqi government in Baghdad to make a better deal with autonomous Kurdistan in the north. That’s above and beyond the more well-known ties between Tillerson and Putin over ExxonMobil’s Siberian oil deals, and navigating the longstanding relationships between his company and dictatorial oil-rich autocracies like Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea and Chad. (Coll’s book really is required reading for those who want to understand foreign policy in the Trump era).

Tillerson, it’s clear, knows his way around the international landscape — probably far more intimately than Trump himself, who has already gaffed his way across the globe in less than two weeks in the Oval Office. Continue reading The case for optimism in Tillerson’s State Department →

14 in 14, Indonesia

14 in 2014: Indonesia presidential election

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SBYin14

11. Indonesia presidential election, July 9.Indonesia Flag

Indonesia will directly elect its president for just the third time in 2014, and it’s the first direct election for which outgoing, term-limited president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (known popularly as ‘SBY’) won’t be on the ballot.

His most likely successor is the young, popular governor of Jakarta state, Joko Widodo, who came to office in 2012 after defeating the incumbent, Fauzi Bowo, who belongs to Yudhoyono’s own Partai Demokrat (Democratic Party).

Widodo (pictured above, left, with SBY), who served as the mayor of Surakarta in Java between 2005 and 2012, has become an overnight political sensation in Indonesia — drawing comparisons to another world leader who spent his youth in Indonesia.  He belongs to the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan (PDI-P, Indonesian Democratic Party — Struggle) that was founded by former president Megawati  Sukarnoputri, who is herself the daughter of Indonesia’s first post-independence president Sukarno.  Though Megawati has expressed some interest in running for president in 2014, she trailed SBY by a comically wide margin in the previous two elections — she lost 60.8% to 26.8% in the most recent July 2009 election, and she lost by a margin of 60.6% to 39.4% in the September 2004 runoff.

Widodo, like Yudhoyono a decade ago, has a pristine, anti-corruption reputation.  In his year as governor, he’s attempted to boost Jakarta’s minimum wage, begin construction on the long-delayed Jakarta subway line, visited some of Jakarta’s poorest neighborhoods, and instituted a universal health care program, though critics argue it’s a populist scheme and that its implementation was flawed.

SBY will leave office in 2014 with a mixed reputation — he brought economic and political stability to Indonesia, which has achieved an average GDP growth of 5.8% in the nine years between 2004 and 2012, and it’s expected to fall just shy of 6% growth in 2013.  His government finalized a peace agreement with the breakaway province of Aceh, and SBY has managed to keep the lid on most separatist tensions within the sprawling Indonesian archipelago.  But Yudhoyono has also failed to root out Indonesia’s widespread and endemic corruption.  Despite helping Indonesia recover from the devastating 2004 earthquake and tsunami, the country continues to lack adequate infrastructure.

Aburizal Bakrie, a businessman who served as coordinating minister for economy from 2004 to 2005 and as coordinating minister for people’s welfare from 2005 to 2009, is likely to become the presidential candidate of Partai Golongan Karya (Party of the Functional Groups, known as ‘Golkar’), Indonesia’s ruling party from 1966 to 1999 during much of Suharto’s authoritarian reign.  Wiranto, a former Golkar member and retired general with a record of human rights abuses in East Timor (during its struggle for independence in the 1990s), may once again run for the presidency.  Prabowo Subianto, a former general and Megawati’s 2009 vice-presidential running mate, may also run as the candidate of a minor center-left party, the Great Indonesia Movement Party.

One early test of support will be Indonesia’s April 9 parliamentary elections, which will determine the members of both houses of the People’s Consultative Assembly — the 560-seat Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat (People’s Representative Council) and the more limited 132-member Dewan Perwakilan Daerah (Regional Representative Council).  Though the Democrats are currently the largest party in the Indonesian assembly, they govern in coalition with Golkar and several other parties.  But polls show that the Democrats could not only fall behind the PDI-P, which leads parliamentary opinion polls and could emerge from opposition for the first time in a decade, but also Golkar. 

Photo credit to ANTARA/ABROR.

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