| | | | Why "Rexit" Was Inevitable | | Rex Tillerson has been shown the door. The idea that corporate success necessarily qualifies someone to serve in the cabinet should leave with him, argues Suzanne Nossel in Foreign Policy.
"Tillerson's woes at State are rooted in the mindset of the CEO-turned-statesman," Nossel writes. "In the upper echelons of the private sector, there is a propensity to view those who have pursued careers in government service as a lesser breed, lacking in ambition, intellect, or savvy. As one anonymous State Department staffer said of Tillerson in an interview with Vanity Fair: 'It's possible that there was disdain for anybody who is a government official because of this idea in the private sector that only the best are in the private sector.' While Tillerson style isn't to insult, his support for massive staff cuts, refusal to meet with senior departmental leaders, and dismissal or abrupt reassignment of top officials demonstrated that he views few among his inherited staff as worthy of the salaries they're paid, much less his time." "Pompeo is much more of a hard-liner than Tillerson, and especially on Iran we should expect the administration to become more confrontational. Trump is replacing someone who wasn't very good at diplomacy with someone who doesn't want the US to engage in it," Larison writes.
"Pompeo has been a vocal opponent of the nuclear deal from the beginning. We should assume that he will tell the president to scrap it, and since that is what Trump already wants to do we should expect that the US will renege on its commitments later this year." On Russia: "While serving in Congress, he was a critic of President Vladimir V. Putin. As CIA director, Mr. Pompeo said he believed intelligence assessments that Mr. Putin was behind the effort to influence the 2016 election — even though Mr. Trump has famously dismissed those reports for fear it would undercut the legitimacy of his election.
"Mr. Pompeo has not, however, gone the next step to describe what he thought the United States should do to counter Russia's actions."
And North Korea: Pompeo "has warned many times, since last summer, that Mr. Kim is 'a few months' away from acquiring the ability to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon," Sanger writes.
"Pompeo also has been in charge of an active covert campaign against the North, which he has alluded to elliptically on several occasions. The question now is whether that covert effort — believed to include sabotage of North Korea's supply chain and renewed cyber attacks on its missile and nuclear programs — will buy Mr. Trump enough time, and leverage, to make a negotiation work."
| | Why Would He Even Want the Job? | | Mike Pompeo's close relationship with President Trump might mean he is in a better position to steer US diplomacy than Rex Tillerson. But having seen the way his soon-to-be predecessor was treated, it's hard to see why he'd want to try, suggests Jim Geraghty for National Review.
"If you're Mike Pompeo, why would you want to be secretary of state? You already have a good working relationship with the president. Pompeo reportedly attends the president's daily intelligence briefing in person almost every day. If you're the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, any president is almost always eager to see you; you've got news and it's usually something important. You're the one with the most information and the best answers; you're in the White House all the time. You're trusted and valued," Geraghty writes.
"We've seen that Trump will decide to have a summit with North Korea and not consult his secretary of state before announcing it. If you're secretary of state, you're usually either in Foggy Bottom or overseas. At any given moment, this president can jump on Twitter and announce to the world that you're wasting your time." | | May Just Got Tough. Really Tough | | | British Prime Minister Theresa May has put America in the hot seat with her statement to Parliament on the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal. To understand why, just look at her careful choice of words, suggests Matt Tait for Lawfare.
May said Britain "assesses it to be 'highly likely' that the Russian government was behind the attack. 'Highly likely' is the U.K. intelligence community's highest level of confidence. Attributions are never certain, so the U.K. intelligence community never says 'X happened'…This is the U.K. saying its threshold to be convinced of the attribution has already been made. It needs no more proof to act," Tait writes.
"Finally, May says magic legal words that will be keeping foreign ministers in NATO up at night: 'If there is no credible response by the end of Tuesday, the U.K. will conclude there has been an "unlawful use of force" by Moscow.' The words 'use of force' are legal terms concerning armed conflict, or jus ad bellum. She does not use them here by accident. The U.K. is stating loudly and unequivocally that the Russian government's use of chemical weapons to murder people in the U.K. isn't being treated as a law-enforcement matter. It's an armed attack, and the U.K.'s response will be justified under the doctrine of self-defense.
"We must be careful not to exaggerate what this means…the U.K. and Russia are not on the path to war…But these are extremely strong words from May, and foreign ministries of European and NATO allies will be paying attention.
"These signals are too strong to walk back. Whatever it does, the U.K. will want to act this week. The White House needs to sit up and take this seriously." | | Why Al Qaeda's Rebranding Is Working | | ISIS's dramatic rise and fall may have shunted al Qaeda out of the headlines in recent years. And for al Qaeda's leadership, that may have been just fine, suggests Bruce Hoffman for the Lowy Interpreter.
"With both a resilient senior command structure and effective communications network now in place, al Qaeda is especially well-positioned to exploit ISIS's weakening military position and territorial losses across the region," Hoffman writes.
"[T]he moratorium on mass-casualty operations imposed by [al Qaeda leader Ayman] al-Zawahiri, especially with respect to those attacks that might kill Muslim civilians, has enabled al Qaeda and its franchises to present themselves as 'moderate extremists' – a less unhinged and ostensibly more palatable rival to ISIS. This development also supports al-Zawahiri's ancillary strategy of allowing ISIS to stay in the limelight, taking all the heat and absorbing the blows from the coalition arrayed against it, while al Qaeda unobtrusively rebuilds its military strength and basks in its new-found cachet as moderate in contrast to the unconstrained ISIS."
| | America's Arms Makers Are Doing a Roaring Trade: Report | | US arms sales have surged in recent years, with Asia and the Middle East being the big takers, according to a new report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
According to SIPRI, US arms sales have climbed 25 percent over the past five years, with the United States accounting for a third of total exports.
"US arms exports in 2013–17 were 58 percent higher than those of Russia—the second largest arms exporter in that period. The USA supplied major arms to 98 states in 2013–17. Exports to states in the Middle East accounted for 49 per cent of total US arms exports in that period," the report found.
"In 2013–17 Saudi Arabia was the world's second largest arms importer [after India], with arms imports increasing by 225 per cent compared with 2008–12." | | | | | | |
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