A Most Peculiar Man

We do not know very much about Rex Tillerson. We know he is tall, that he has a deep sonorous voice, that he has an elegant Texas accent, that he spent 45 years with one company, rising through its ranks until he became CEO of Exxon Mobil.

We know he negotiated deals all over the world for that company for oil and mineral exploration and extraction rights and, by accounts in news reports, achieved among other things the largest drilling rights the Russian Republic has granted to any company, perhaps the largest oil exploration and drilling rights anywhere in the world.

In fact, Exon Mobil, through the offices of Mr. Tillerson and Vladimir Putin, has the right to drill in 63.6 million acres of Russia and Russian waters. That is the equivalent of about 100,000 square miles. By comparison, the state I live in, New Jersey, covers barely 8,900 square miles and Mr. Tilerson’s vast home state, Texas, contains some 27,000 square miles.

Four times Texas, give or take, is a lot of territory in which to own rights to explore and extract oil and gas.

For some reason, and we do not know the reason — only Mr. Tillerson and President Trump know the reason or reasons — in choosing a cabinet, the president chose Mr. Tillerson to be secretary of state notwithstanding the fact that he has no experience in public office, in diplomacy or, in fact, democracy. Exxon Mobil is not a democracy. It is, as the president would say, a major, major, major public corporation and that is a far thing from a democracy.

So yes, the secretary of state has done deals all over the world with plutocrats and autocrats. Nothing wrong with that. It is the world he functioned in, that we live in; and a lot of autocrats and plutocrats live on land from under which there is a great deal of oil, gas and mineral wealth to extract. Mr. Tillerson owed his company’s shareholders his best efforts to get rights to what lies below as much of those lands as he could. And he did.

He has now held the office of secretary of state for about five weeks in which time has has barely been seen and almost not been heard.

We have become inured over the 40 years to the notion, in fact to the fact that the American secretary of state travels the world  incessantly, coming home once in a while to repack his or her bag and then head off to yet another important conference, confidential consultation, grim negotiation or immediate crisis point on the globe.

Our peripatetic secretaries of state probably have spent 250 or more days a year traveling the world outside the United States; always on the move doing the nation’s international relations business.

But in the five  weeks Mr. Tillerson has been secretary he has taken, so far as I recollect from news stories, but three trips. One put him in Mexico and accomplished nothing.  A second took him to Europe to utter nostrums to reassure nervous allies and now, he is  in Asia.

The Asia trip began two days ago in Japan and advanced today (March 17) to South Korea.  Mr. Tillerson even made a perfunctory but traditional stop in the DMZ, where from one news video I saw, he was, literally observed closely by a soldier of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea.

He moves on tomorrow, March 18, from Seoul, which is just 35 miles from the DMZ — from the South Korean border with North Korea — to Beijing for talks with high and maybe the highest ranking Chinese officials.

And in every instance the subject is North Korea and its development of nuclear weapons and the threat that poses to its immediate neighbors; to our allies, Japan and South Korea, and to us since North Korea is working to develop an ICBM capable of reaching  Hawaii and beyond to the West Coast of the United States.

But on his travels, unaccompanied by the press corps that every other secretary of state who traveled has taken with himself or herself so that there be witnesses, because you want witnesses if you represent a democracy; unaccompanied by senior staff because so far Mr. Tillerson has none, the secretary has announced two new notions in our dealings with and about North Korea.

First he has opined as to the possibility of making South Korea and/or Japan nuclear nations so that they can contend with the North Korean threat.They really do not want that, it could all but assure the North Koreans would take the bait. They like and want our nuclear umbrella. They almost surely do not want to open their own because the nuclear rain might rain down — on them. And we should recall that the only nation that has experienced that is Japan.

Second he has strongly indicated that the United States will use, if it deems necessary,  military force to remove the North Korean nuclear threat. Taking him at his word and understanding the power of our $540 billion a year Department of Defense, which includes a  Navy that operates 12 aircraft carriers and their task forces (in a world in which the next carrier nation, India, has but two )  — taking him at his word, this in sum is a threat to take military action against whatever place or places in North Korea where there is/are nuclear development and storage and  missile development and storage.

Parenthetically about aircraft carriers, Russia has about a one-third sized decrepit carrier, the French have one, the Chinese have a small one and the British have taken their last  out of service because they can’t afford it anymore. We have 12. But as Alfred E. Newman said, “What me worry?” Yes, despite that we worry; and rightfully.

News accounts tell us we know where those nuclear and nuclear related sites  are and that they are not easily accessible to attack, so this would not be a simple proposition.

There are nine nuclear armed nations. There would have been ten but the agreement between Iran and the U.S. and four other powers kept Iran from joining the club. Five of the nine, the U.S., Russia, Britain, France and China, adhere to international control of nuclear weapons. Four do not. Those are India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. Israel in fact does not even acknowledge that it has nuclear weapons though it is believed to have 80 to 100 of them.

There are approximately, among these nations, about 15,500/16,000 nuclear weapons of which about 20% are active, that is to say ready to use in a jiffy if someone becomes insane enough to do that. The U.S and Russia each have about 7,000 and each has about 1,450 jiffy ready nukes.

The Russians have a few hundred more than we do but the U.S., in turn has considerably more delivery systems through what is called our Nuclear Triad, the combination of nuclear powered submarine missile systems, land-based missiles and intercontinental bombers. So that’s a wash or really in our favor — though please, don’t do us any favors like that.

President Obama budgeted  $1 trillion over the next 30 years to upgrade and maintain our nuclear arsenal. We, Russia and several other nuclear powers are working on missiles that would fly at three times the speed of current missiles. The doomsday clock is ticking faster these days and no one knows if or when we will pass fail safe. We have not really had to think about it for 30 years. Suddenly we do again.

So with all of that as background what did Mr. Tillerson  do on his Asia trip that probably he should not have? He warned that we would use whatever means necessary to reign in, control and even, one supposes, suppress the North Korean nuclear threat.

Why is that a mistake? Because everyone in the world knows we can do that. Madman Kim in Pyongyang knows that. President Xi of China, which for all its economic power in the world is not a military giant alike to us or even like us really, having but one reconditioned aircraft carrier and but 250 nuclear warheads, knows that very well.

The trick is you don’t say that out loud if you are the American secretary of state or secretary of defense or the president himself. You don’t say it because everyone in the world who needs to know it, already knows it.

Once you say it, you might have to do it and if you do, well is  there any turning back and is there any way of knowing what it will bring, which might include the firing of nuclear weapons from North Korea across 35 miles of the Korean peninsula aimed on Seoul, a city of 10 million people.

Once you utter the threat out loud, you almost remove the threat. It is the unspoken threat that can move China to act, that binds a broken republic in South Korea to us, that holds in check  long-suppressed Japanese nationalism that Prime Minister Abe aches to unleash — notwithstanding the pacific nature of his nation that we enforced on it by and during our occupation and by drafting their constitution for them —  one that proscribes Japanese military adventurism.

The Secretary of State is a most peculiar man, doing and saying very peculiar things. He could be taking us places we should not go, should not be — and have not been since the Soviets put missiles in Cuba. So there is worry because there is nothing in what we know of him or of his experience to say that he has any idea about what he is doing.

Well, there is a language called public speak. When you win a favorable decision in a court the public speak response is to say, “We are pleased”, when you lose the public speak is to say “We are disappointed”. You leave doors open, you leave avenues of speech on which to advance or retreat and, above all you are temperate and careful and say nothing to cause alarm, gloat, or dissolve or surrender dignity and the ability to speak again and be taken seriously.

In public speak, a vital language to be known, not learned, but known by high ranking public officials before they assume such offices and to be translated for them by others who speak it, you expect a secretary of state in the present circumstances with regard to Asia and his trip there to say something like this:

“We are consulting with our allies in the region and others seeking avenues of mutual accord and response to maintain stability in the North Pacific. We continue and will continue to keep open lines of communication as we seek a mutual and joint response moving forward.”

You say something like that and you leave every door open.