US diplomacy in crisis amid cuts and confusion at state department

The US state department is hosting a 68-nation meeting on Wednesday aimed at consolidating the international effort against Islamic State.

But the foreign ministers are convening in Washington at a time when the state department itself is under siege, facing swingeing budget cuts by a hostile White House, and led by a former oil executive who has said he did not want the job in the first place.

Rex Tillerson has billed the counter-Isis coalition meeting as a decisive moment “to set Isis on a lasting and irreversible path to defeat”. The secretary of state lambasted the Obama administration for its policy on Isis, claiming his predecessor never had a proper strategy to defeat the extremist movement.

“All that did was drag out the agony for everyone,” Tillerson told the Independent Journal Review (IJR), in his first interview since he surfaced in December as a surprise candidate for the role of secretary of state.

He said that the then president-elect, Donald Trump, had invited him to his transition headquarters in New York ostensibly to talk “about the world” and then stunned Tillerson, about to retire as head of ExxonMobil, by offering him the post of the nation’s top diplomat.

He said it was his wife who persuaded to accept the offer, telling him he was “supposed to do this”.

He made clear that the anti-Isis effort would be a priority for him and the defence secretary, James Mattis, who will also take part in Wednesday’s coalition meeting. A top Tillerson aide is quoted in the IJR article as saying the two men “get along like gin and vermouth”.

Over the course of the election campaign, Trump assured voters that he had a plan to defeat Isis, but never elaborated what that plan was. Tillerson and Mattis will seek to outline a strategy on Wednesday.

Tillerson explained it as a three-step process beginning with a military campaign, followed by a transition phase and a stability programme. It remains unclear, however, what that would mean in practice and how this plan would differ from the previous administration’s anti-Isis campaign, which was in full swing when Barack Obama left office.

One departure is that the new administration has stepped up the number of US ground troops involved in the push towards the Isis stronghold of Raqqa in Syria, a reflection of a general military-first bent of the Trump White House.

Its budget proposals would see a cut for the state department and US foreign aid of 28% of its current budget to less than $26bn (£21bn). When other cuts to contingency funds are taken into account, the effective funding decrease is about a third. Meanwhile, under the “Make America Great Again” budget, military spending is meant to rise by $54bn.

Senior Republicans in Congress have said they would oppose such deep cuts, but Tillerson himself has been criticised by former state department officials and supporters of US diplomacy for failing to stand up to Trump on the issue.

In the interview published by IJR on Tuesday night, Tillerson said state department spending was unsustainable. He claimed he talked to the president on a daily basis but conceded he had not discussed with him what such a sharp decrease in funding would mean. “We haven’t gotten that far yet,” he said.

Antony Blinken, the deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration, said the bid to boost military spending at the expense of funding diplomacy represented a “fundamental misunderstanding” of national security.

“Diplomacy is national security,” Blinken said. He pointed out that without strong US diplomacy around the world, there would not be a coalition of more than 60 countries in the fight against Isis.

The cuts, Blinken said: “have the potential to dramatically dilute our soft power, and that has done wonders for us over many years and many places”.

“In a world in which all you have is your hard power, all of a sudden every problem is a nail and the only tool you have is a hammer,” he added. “The first people who’ll tell you that’s misguided is our military.”

In discussing the primacy of the fight against Isis, Tillerson appeared to turn the previous administration’s approach on its head. Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, saw the spread of Isis as being a consequence of the brutal nature of the counter-insurgency conducted by Russian, Iran and the Damascus regime. Extremism could only be defeated ultimately by an end to the war and a political transition.

Tillerson suggested that the fight against Isis had to come first: “We can’t get to deconflicting the rest of the region with Isis in the way,” he said. Neither he, nor anyone else in the Trump administration, has explained what such an approach means for cooperation with Russia, Iran or the Assad government in Damascus.

David Miliband, former UK foreign secretary and now president of the International Rescue Committee, said those decisions had to be made at the outset of any new strategy.

“The US needs to decide what role it wants to play, and who it wants to ally with, in the debates about the future of those parts of Syria still outside government control, and the future shape of a national government,” Miliband said.

“This cannot be considered independently of the commitment to defeat Isis in Iraq, where the US again faces the conundrum that Iran has the same declared enemy, but where victory threatens to extend its influence.”

Before it decides how to frame its new relations with US adversaries, critics of the new administration say, it has to find a way to stop alienating its allies around the world.

Trump used an awkward visit by Angela Merkel to Washington last week to berate Germany for not spending enough on defence, while his spokesman refused to apologise for an apparent endorsement of a baseless claim that the UK had spied on Trump on behalf of the Obama administration.

In his interview, Tillerson appeared to accuse South Korean officials of lying after it was reported in the Seoul press that he had not dined with his Korean counterparts (a diplomatic norm in Seoul and in many other capitals) because he had been fatigued.

“They never invited us for dinner, then at the last minute they realised that optically it wasn’t playing very well in public for them, so they put out a statement that we didn’t have dinner because I was tired,” he said.

The secretary of state waded from that row directly into another, with America’s transatlantic allies, when Reuters new agency broke the news on Monday that he would be skipping a Nato foreign ministers meeting in early April so he could attend a Trump meeting with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and that he would be flying to Moscow later in the same month.

Nato officials said the timings of ministerial meetings were decided by suggesting dates, and then waiting for a few days to see if any of the capitals of the 28 member states objected. In this case, the US did not object to the proposed dates for the North Atlantic Council of 5 and 6 April, and so a media advisory was issued on 8 March announcing it would take place. Nato officials only found out on Tuesday that Tillerson would not be attending after all.

The state department said on Tuesday it was exploring alternative dates for the Nato meeting, but Daniel Baer, former US ambassador to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, said the clear lack of enthusiasm for the alliance was damaging.

“The US has to show up – and to lead – at Nato, and not just because others expect us to, but because especially in an era of global turmoil and Russian revanchism, the US has an interest Nato’s unity and strength,” Baer said. “This administration has routinely depicted Nato as a charity project for Europeans – it isn’t; a strong Nato is in the US national interest. The sad part about this whole episode is that it shows such a lack of understanding for the role the US plays in Nato and in the world.”