Rex Tillerson has been sworn in as the new United States Secretary of State, the man with the unenviable job of trying to explain the policies of the administration of President Donald Trump to the rest of the world. He has a tough job. In the two weeks since he was sworn in and left to his own devices and executive orders in the White house, Trump has managed to alienate Muslims, Mexicans and a majority of right-thing people the world over.
It took just six days for Trump to insist that he would be building a wall along America’s southern border and that Mexico would be paying for it, with his Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, suggesting that a 20 per cent tariff on all Mexican goods would easily raise the revenues for the frontier barrier. The Mexican President, Enrique Pena Nieto said he was cancelling a proposed state visit to Washington, while Vincente Fox, a former president of Mexico appeared on CNN to compare the new administration to that of Adolf Hitler in 1933.
Tillerson’s nomination was still stalled in the committee rooms of the Senate when British Prime minister Theresa May appeared in Washington and invited the new president over to London for a visit. That move has attracted nearly two million signatures in an online petition opposed to his visit, with officials in London now faced with the prospect of mass protests outside Buckingham Palace should Trump meet Queen Elizabeth, as is customary on a state visit.
But Tillerson’s biggest mess now is the fallout from the executive order banning visitors from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Yemen and Somalia — orders that have caused chaos and were also applied initially to green card holders from those Muslim-majority nations.
No sooner had Tillerson been sworn in than his president was on the phone to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, having a conversation that reportedly ended with the handset being slammed down.
The new US secretary of state will have his work cut out in trying to explain why the Trump administration is intent on picking a fight with China over the South china Sea, or why his administration is intent on ripping up decades of official US policy towards Being and one-China, treating Taiwan as a regular-nation ally.
If Tillerson still doesn’t have enough with that, then he has to defuse the potential fallout from Washington moving its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to occupied East Jerusalem. Yes, Tillerson is a busy man.
