I am beginning to think that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s doesn’t have the same stamina as his predecessors John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. First, there was his Asian trip.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson cut short his recent visit with South Korean officials due to “fatigue,” the Korea Herald reported on Friday.
According to the newspaper, the top U.S. diplomat did not have lunch or dinner with South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se and acting President and Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn during his visit.
Now there is his African trip:
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will conclude his first diplomatic trip to Africa a day early and fly back to Washington on Monday amid new developments in the administration’s approach to North Korea.
Tillerson met with leaders in Chad during the first half of the day on Monday. He was then scheduled to travel to Nigeria, where he would meet with the country’s president, foreign minister and representatives from the U.S. embassy there.
However, he will cut his time in Nigeria short, according to a Reuters report. Tillerson will spend just a few hours there and then fly back to the U.S. on Monday night.
“Due to demands in the secretary’s schedule, he is returning to the U.S. one day early after concluding official meetings in Chad and Nigeria,” Under Secretary of State Steve Goldstein said.
Tillerson had to cancel all of his planned events in Kenya on Saturday because he was not feeling well.
Some may speculate that Tillerson’s sudden illness in Korea had something to do with Trump’s fire and fury comments and that his malady on Saturday was a reaction to not being consulted at all before the White House announced on Thursday night that President Trump would agree to meet with North Korean madman Kim Jong-Un. These same skeptics may ruminate aloud about the possibility that Tillerson is cutting short his visit to Nigeria in order to get back to Washington DC before he suffers any additional surprises or humiliations.
Of course, he could be coming home (or being called home) to announce his resignation. Or, if Christopher Steele is correct that Tillerson was essentially the Putin-approved alternative to Mitt Romney, maybe something more sinister is afoot.
According to the report, in late November 2016, Steele relayed information from his Russian sources that senior Kremlin officials had intervened to block Mitt Romney as President-elect Trump’s choice for secretary of State. Reporter Jane Mayer writes that Moscow had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be willing to lift sanctions related to Ukraine and cooperate with Russia’s involvement in Syria.
Who can say?
Like all of Trump’s Best People!, Tillerson has also shown absolutely no interest in being an actual Secretary of State, much less doing anything the Top U.S. Diplomat is expected to do.
My guess is the whole trip was a tax payer funded check on Exxon’s Niger oil interests (Current largest (and least regulated) Africa producer and big part of Exxon’s portfolio) then jet back home as to stop wasting his time with the poor’s of some other nation.
Pretty sure Niger has no significant oil or gas resources so maybe you meant Nigeria?
I love the idea of ole Exxon Tillerson deciding to resign and needing to get home super-quick before his jet-flying privileges are revoked by Drumpf. Goodness knows there’s a history of former “best people” being abandoned on the runway once their usefulness has expired.
Alas, the truth is probably that Exx just misses the comforts of home after a grueling one day of meetings.
I imagine every African country he visits inquires about the status of some student’s visa to come to US to study medicine/tech and the only thing Rex knows is the price of a barrel of oil.
The onslaught of the next gaggle awaiting entry into Trump’s chaos reminds me of the comment made that it’s best not to waste the chaos of war; instead, make the most of the chaos to achieve your real goals.
I see the name John Bolton being teased as the next Nat’l Security Advisor. What’s next, Michael Ledeen as SoS?
You mean, an Arctic Ocean shipping treaty to make the US, Canada, and Russia a convenient market for sourcing China’s fossil fuel supplies. Or Russia as a supply backup to US fossil fuels. Plot out where renewables are making big growth. Where that is not occurring, the fossil fuel powers will have some cooperative strategies, so long as Russia and Saudi Arabia are not crossed against the US. Tillerson’s pals are going to want to get that old crude moving.
TPM “Tillerson Breaks With White House, Calls Out Russia For Ex-Spy Poisoning”
Maybe ‘fatigue’ as in “tired of this bullshit”
Well now we know
Fired on Friday
I’m here in Indonesia. Here he actually got fired today on Tuesday but time is relative so maybe he also gets fired again on Friday (my B-Day, yeah!). That would be a very Trumpian thing to do.
. . . before breakfast!
(This regimen is, of course, now de rigeur training for GOPers/”conservatives”.)
Or perhaps even more on point, getting jam every other day — but “today isn’t any other day, you know”:
“Of course, he could be coming home (or being called home) to announce his resignation.”
You called that one. From NPR: Trump Replacing Secretary Of State Tillerson With CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
Not resigned. Fired.
Fired by Twitter; reports are he wasn’t even given a reason, let alone given his walking papers face to face by Mr. “You’re Fired!”
And right after Tillerson says yes, Russia was responsible for the UK poisoning.
Hmmmmmmmmm……..
Yeah, it’s that bad. At this point, it seems pretty clear that we have a President who is an actual traitor and probably a de facto Russian agent. This is a real emergency, at this point.
As I’m sure you know by now, it’s because he’s been abruptly sacked. As usual, Trump is too much of a coward to do it in person; he just tweets it. What a disgusting individual.
Look, I work on foreign affairs. Tillerson has been basically incompetent as a manager of State. At best, he and Mattis tag teamed to keep Trump’s really stupid I-hate-everything-Obama-has-ever-done policy regime from really just destroying the US’s remaining foreign policy credibility but otherwise he was really out of his depth.
Pompeo will just be the Trump enabler though I hold out a very feeble hope that he might evolve but probably not. Just a lot more shitstorm. Probably, the meeting with Kim won’t happen now even though it was always a barely possible thing.
I just have this feeling that the whole Administration is just crumbling rapidly. And yet people insist on talking about Trump being re-elected in 2020. Who are these people? I still don’t think he’s going to make it even through 1 term.