(03-13-2018, 09:50 AM)hazard Wrote: Which means the CIA needs a new director.

Is it strange that I think Tillerson was probably one of the more qualified people in the Trump administration? At least in so far that although he was not a career civil servant he at least managed to work quite well with the department he was leading and made sense to the world when it came to US policy?

Quote:Tillerson was arguably the weakest secretary of state in the post-World War II era. He oversaw a failed reorganization effort at Foggy Bottom, which depressed morale and led to an exodus of veteran diplomats. His downgrading of human rights as an essential part of American foreign policy mortified the human rights community and initiated a retreat from defense of democracies at the very time Western democracies are under assault from authoritarians and neo-fascists. His aversion to the press and to the role of public diplomacy more generally, as well as his frosty relationship with Congress, indicated that he never made the successful transition from oil executive to the country’s lead diplomat.

Quote:Max Bergmann, another State Department veteran, now at the Center for American Progress, tells me, “He is a contender for worst Secretary of State in history. He was also virtually irrelevant in crafting policy.” However, Bergmann says, what “he will be most known for his disdain of U.S. diplomacy. In a period of economic expansion he set about gutting a department that had already suffered under six years of austerity.” He added, “His disastrous ‘reorg’ has proved a lie to the notion that government should be run like a business. In his brief tenure [he] has found a way to inflict lasting damage to the diplomatic corps and U.S. diplomacy.”

hazard Wrote:From his lack of news relevance I figured he was less incompetent than the average Trump appointee.