Tuesday, the 13th of March was an unlucky day for U.S. Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson: He was unceremoniously fired by Donald Trump with a simple “Tweet”! With Tillerson’s departure, the voice of reason and one of the last remaining adults in the Kindergarden known as Trump’s cabinet, is gone.
The relationship between Trump and Rex Tillerson was untenable. They clashed on just about every major policy issue – from the Iran nuclear deal to North Korea and the trade boycott against Qatar. Tillerson argued against Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords as well as against moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. It had to come: Trump fell out with Tillerson almost immediately. Tillerson clashed with Trump over reducing the State Department budget by 33% and tried to keep moderate career diplomats at their posts with the aim of neutralizing Trumps most destructive foreign policy impulses. Currently, Trump has left ambassadorial posts unfilled in 44 countries – notably among them the European Union, Germany, Egypt and South Korea. Famously, Tillerson once called Trump “a complete idiot” in an open meeting at his department! It goes without saying that the role of Secretary of State ranks above all others in the U.S. Cabinet and there must not be a hair’s breadth separating the secretary and the president. So, who is Tillerson being replaced by? The man is Mike Pompeo, aged 55, a failed businessman who had been a congressman since 2010 from the obscure 4th District of Kansas but was picked by Trump to be Director of the C.I.A. with no prior experience in intelligence or national security. And now Trump has made him Secretary of State with no prior experience or qualification – except for the fact that he is the ideological identical twin of Trump and his irrational excesses: He hates Iran and has been working with Trump to dismantle the nuclear enrichment program suspension agreement, he steadfastly has contradicted his own C.I.A. in insisting that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election and he is a fervent advocate of regime change in North Korea. Having said that, we must recall that South Korean national security director, Chung Eui-yong, on March 8th , delivered an invitation to Donald Trump from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for a summit conference between the two men in the near future: Trump – without consulting anyone – impulsively accepted immediately, even though his chief adviser on North Korea, Joseph Yun, left the administration in protest three weeks ago. Well, now Mike Pompeo has been designated chief adviser on North Korea and will accompany Trump to the summit of two dangerously unstable men with their fingers poised to press the nuclear button…. What could possibly go wrong?!! Incredible as it may seem, President Trump has fallen into his own game, that is, the threatening one now becomes the threatened one. While Trump threatens the world with a trade war, Kim Jong threatens him with a nuclear war. It seems that now two people with narcissistic personality disorder are confronted with an imaginative behavior of grandiosity but with a frightening profile that are capable of putting the future of the world in a thread.
By: Dr. Juan Carlos Botello and Dr. Werner G.C. Voigt (Independent External Contributor)
