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Tillerson faces task of defending Trump’s decision to allies
Trump’s climate reversal is the latest challenge he has presented Tillerson, a newcomer to diplomacy who is still working to establish his credibility as an advocate of American foreign policy.
As President Donald Trump announced America’s withdrawal from a global climate change pact, infuriating allies far and wide, the man charged with defending the decision to the world kept his distance.
Having quietly lobbied Trump to stay in the pact, secretary of state Rex Tillerson was a few blocks away at the state department, where America’s diplomats were bracing for a flood of protests from overseas. The European Council’s leader called Trump’s decision a “big mistake.” The typically understated German Chancellor Angela Merkel deemed it “extremely regrettable — and that’s putting it very mildly.” French President Emmanuel Macron trolled Trump’s campaign motto, saying all nations share a responsibility to “make our planet great again.”
Trump’s climate reversal is the latest challenge he has presented to Tillerson, a newcomer himself to the world of diplomacy who is still working to establish his credibility as an advocate of American foreign policy. Not only did Trump appear to overrule Tillerson’s advice concerning the Paris agreement, but the decision fanned fears of the US abdicating its global leadership role and shunning international consensus on the world’s most pressing issues.
Tillerson wasn’t the only Cabinet member to skip the Rose Garden ceremony where Trump announced his decision, but his absence was perhaps the most glaring. He met Trump only hours earlier in the White House. Tillerson’s aides maintained that he decided to follow his own schedule, which had him in his seventh-floor office on Thursday afternoon as Trump was speaking.
Aides could not say if Tillerson watched the president on television. But he will be almost surely be required to recite the rationale for Trump’s pullout from the agreement cutting carbon emissions, given that his agency led the Paris deal negotiations and will now have to manage the international fallout.
“I don’t think we’re going to change our ongoing efforts to reduce those emissions in the future,” Tillerson said on Friday, playing down the president’s decision. “So hopefully people can keep it in perspective.”
Tillerson called Trump’s action a “policy decision.” He insisted the US should be proud of its “terrific record” in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, even before the Paris pact took effect late last year.
