US President Donald Trump yesterday fired secretary of state Rex Tillerson after a series of public rifts over policy on North Korea, Russia and Iran, replacing his chief diplomat with loyalist CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
The biggest shakeup of Trump’s Cabinet since he took office in January 2017 was announced by the president on Twitter as his administration works toward a meeting with the leader of North Korea.
Some foreign policy experts criticised the decision to swap out top diplomats so soon before the unprecedented meeting and worried that Pompeo would encourage Trump to scrap the Iran nuclear deal and be hawkish on North Korea.
Trump chose the CIA’s deputy director, Gina Haspel, to replace Pompeo at the intelligence agency.
She is a veteran CIA clandestine officer backed by many in the US intelligence community but regarded warily by some in Congress for her involvement in the agency’s “black site” detention facilities.
The tensions peaked last fall amid reports Tillerson had called Trump a “moron” and considered resigning.
“We got along actually quite well but we disagreed on things,” Trump said on the White House lawn yesterday.
“When you look at the Iran deal: I think it’s terrible, I guess he thinks it was OK. I wanted to break it or do something and he felt a little bit differently.”
Trump said he and Pompeo have “a similar thought process.”
Pompeo, a former Army officer who represented a Kansas district in Congress before taking the CIA job, is seen as a Trump loyalist who has enjoyed a less hostile relationship with career spies than Tillerson had with career diplomats.
Senior White House officials said Trump wanted his new team in place before any summit with Kim Jong-un, who invited the US president to meet by May after months of escalating tensions over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes.
Tillerson’s imminent departure had been rumoured for several months and Trump said he and Tillerson had discussed the move for a long time.
But Steve Goldstein, a State Department undersecretary of state for public affairs, said Tillerson did not know why he was being pushed out and had intended to stay.
Goldstein was fired later yesterday, two US officials told Reuters.
Foreign policy experts from Republican and Democratic administrations also questioned Trump’s timing and choice, noting that Pompeo was known as a political partisan who strongly opposed the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
Evans Revere, a former senior US diplomat who dealt with North Korea under president George W Bush, said Trump’s move sends “a bad signal about the role of diplomacy.”
“Tillerson’s replacement by...Pompeo, who is known as a political partisan and an opponent of the Iran agreement, raises the prospect of the collapse of that deal, and increases the possibility that the administration might soon face not one, but two nuclear crises,” he said.
Senior White House officials said White House chief of staff John Kelly had asked Tillerson to step down on Friday but did not want to make it public while he was on a trip to Africa.
Trump’s Twitter announcement came only a few hours after Tillerson landed in Washington.
“Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!” Trump said on Twitter.
Tillerson joined a long list of senior officials who have either resigned or been fired since Trump took office in January 2017.
Others include strategist Steve Bannon, national security adviser Michael Flynn, FBI director James Comey, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, health secretary Tom Price, communications directors Hope Hicks and Anthony Scaramucci, economic adviser Gary Cohn and press secretary Sean Spicer.
If confirmed by the US Senate after an April committee hearing, Pompeo will be taking over a State Department shaken by the departures of many senior diplomats and embittered by proposed budget cuts.
But over time, many lawmakers grew to appreciate Tillerson as a relatively steady hand in the chaotic Trump administration.
“He represented a stable view with regard to the implementation of diplomacy in North Korea, Iran and other places in the world,” said Senator Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during most of Tillerson’s tenure.
Outgoing US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson makes a statement on his departure from the State Department at the State Department in Washington, DC, yesterday.
