Rex Tillerson may not be an outright appeaser like his immediate predecessors, but he sure lacks clarity

Has anyone else noticed that the public pronouncements of the president and his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson aren't always in sync?

That in itself is a bit confusing and unsettling, but what amplifies the unsettled feeling is that neither one of them seem to fully grasp the dynamics of the particular foreign-policy situations they address.


Last week, I wrote a post entitled "Afghanistan Policy Under Trump - Initial Thoughts." I'm glad I titled it thusly. I've had some time to further consider aspects of what I wrote, particularly this point:

There is validity to the argument that goes, "We've been at this longer than we've ever been at any other war, and we're still facing the same basic problem. Doesn't that tell us that our basic approach is not getting us desired results?" But, given that Afghanistan is about as failed a state as there can be, the argument that bad actors rush into power vacuums holds greater sway, it seems to me.

Andrew McCarthy, writing at NRO, has a piece this morning that, taken as a whole, invites us to not be overly compelled by the bad-actors-rushing-into-power-vacuums argument. His main point is that because the Taliban's basic strategy has always been to outlast the West and because, as McCarthy points out . . .

So virulently anti-American is their totalitarian ideology that the Taliban are making common cause with their Shiite counterparts in Iran to persevere in their jihad against American forces . . . 

that there will be no decisive US / West victory over them.

But McCarthy makes a number of important subsidiary points along the way that launched my train of thought about the Tillerson - Trump divergence.

There's this:

By the time the secretary was done tinkering with the president’s “plan for victory,” one couldn’t be sure if the Taliban was an enemy, a terrorist organization, or a “peace partner.” Indeed, not content to leave pathetic enough alone, Tillerson contemplated “political legitimacy” for the mullahs, proclaiming that the Trump administration “stand[s] ready to support peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban without precondition.” You read that right: without precondition — not even the condition that they abandon their alliance with al-Qaeda (you know, the reason we went to Afghanistan in the first place). As the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes observed, this is “the same kind of diplomatic tail-chasing that was a priority of the Obama administration’s failed approach.” 

The band’s got new players. The pitch is a bit higher. But the song remains the same. 

Ultimately, Tillerson elaborated, “it is going to be up to the Afghan government and the representatives of the Taliban to work through a reconciliation process.” Sound familiar? Yeah . . . just like Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, during an April 2016 trip to Kabul, expressing “support for the government of Afghanistan’s efforts to end the conflict in Afghanistan through a peace and reconciliation process with the Taliban.”

A little later in the piece, he spells out what is glaringly wrong with Tillerson's take:

To be fair, there are no good answers about what to do in that awful country. But it is hard to imagine a worse answer than trying to reconcile the Taliban to the regime.

He concludes that  . . .

We should not inch up our forces in Afghanistan. We should strip down to the minimum assets needed to carry out and support counterterrorism strikes. And we should have as little to do with this region as our vital interests allow.

What I want to come back to, though, is Tillerson's role in this. His tone regarding Afghanistan is disturbingly similar to that he's taken with North Korea:

Tillerson, speaking at the State Department press briefing, stressed that the US was not seeking regime change or looking to send its military "north of the 38th parallel" that divides North and South Korea. But he emphasized that the danger posed by Pyongyang, which test fired two intercontinental ballistic missiles in July, was unacceptable. 

"We do not seek regime change. We do not seek an accelerated reunification of the peninsula. We do not seek an excuse to send our military north of the 38th parallel," Tillerson said during a surprise visit to the agency's briefing room on Tuesday. 

"We are not your enemy, we are not your threat, but you are presenting an unacceptable threat to us and we have to respond," Tillerson said, speaking to North Korea directly. "We would like to sit and have a dialogue about the future." 

Mr. Secretary, it seems to me that  North Korea has already determined that we are its enemy. And that's not just a matter of differing viewpoints or easy-to-dismiss bluster characteristic of rogue regime. When a nation-state makes such a bold claim about another nation-state, attention must be paid.

We do seek regime change and reunification, or at least we ought to. Does Tillerson understand this? And if so, isn't he concerned that, if things develop certain way going forward, he may come to look like a liar?

We are, after all, currently involved in drills with South Korea that involve decapitation-of-top-leadership scenarios.

When Tillerson assumed his post, there was much talk about how he would root out the State Department's entrenched bureaucracy and bring clarity and consistency to its mission.

That hasn't happened.