sundance:
“The Trump Doctrine”
Earlier today Secretary of State Rex Tillerson talked to the employees at the State Department and delivered outstanding remarks to explain the Trump administration foreign policy approach. T-Rex talks about the ongoing State Dept. mission and how values and policies intersect with the larger ‘America-First’ strategy.
Specifically T-Rex explains how the distinction between U.S. ‘values’ relates to U.S. ‘policy’ but determinations of influence and our best interests cannot necessarily be contingent upon foreign governments accepting values that are inherently different to their culture.
These remarks delivered to State Dept personnel are exceptionally well presented and intensely interesting.
https://youtu.be/-YD-aHt5qdM
[Transcript] SECRETARY TILLERSON: Good morning. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you. Are we on? Can you all hear me back there in the back? Can you hear me now? (Laughter.) Can you hear me now?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
SECRETARY TILLERSON: All right. I told them I have to walk around. My wife has always said if you tied my hands down to my side, I would be a complete mute. (Laughter.) So I’m not great at podiums. I do know how to read a speech, but I thought today we’d just have a chat.
So I’ve been here about three months now, we’ve been working alongside one another, and so I thought it’d be worthwhile to just share a few of my perspectives with you on where I think we are and some things that are coming that I know are of interest to you.
But before I do that, I would be remiss if I did not thank all of those who have stepped into acting roles during these past three months to help me, and starting with acting Deputy Secretary Tom Shannon, who’s just been stellar. (Applause.) But I also want to acknowledge the large number of people who are – stepped into under secretary, assistant secretary roles, director roles, and a number of chief of missions around the world as well.
Your willingness to step up and not just fill that role, but to take responsibility for the role and to lead the organization through some pretty challenging first 90 days – it’s not like we haven’t had some things to work on. And so I want to express my appreciation to all of you for helping me and helping my team as we came on board. And I’ve just been really gratified at the work that everyone’s undertaken in that regard.
So I thought we’d talk about a couple of things. I want to share my perspective as to how does this administration’s policies of “America first” fit into our foreign policy and foreign affairs. And so I want to touch on that. And then I’ll take a quick walk around the world.
Most of you have some familiarity of what’s going on around the world, but I thought just regionally I’d hit each one of them very quickly, to share with you my perspective on kind of where I feel we are, and then in some areas where we’ve not yet had time to devote the attention to we would like, and I don’t want that to be in any way considered that we don’t think those are important. It’s kind of a – what’s the hottest fire that we’ve got to deal with?
So I want to talk about that a little bit, and then spend some time at the end talking about where we’re going in the future of the department, USAID, and, as you know, we just kicked off this listening exercise.
So let’s talk first about my view of how you translate “America first” into our foreign policy. And I think I approach it really that it’s America first for national security and economic prosperity, and that doesn’t mean it comes at the expense of others.
Our partnerships and our alliances are critical to our success in both of those areas. But as we have progressed over the last 20 years – and some of you could tie it back to the post-Cold War era as the world has changed, some of you can tie it back to the evolution of China since the post-Nixon era and China’s rise as an economic power, and now as a growing military power – that as we participated in those changes, we were promoting relations, we were promoting economic activity, we were promoting trade with a lot of these emerging economies, and we just kind of lost track of how we were doing. And as a result, things got a little bit out of balance.
And I think that’s – as you hear the President talk about it, that’s what he really speaks about, is: Look, things have gotten out of balance, and these are really important relationships to us and they’re really important alliances, but we’ve got to bring them back into balance.
So whether it’s our asking of NATO members to really meet their obligations, even though those were notional obligations, we understand – and aspirational obligation, we think it’s important that those become concrete. And when we deal with our trading partners – that things have gotten a little out of bounds here, they’ve gotten a little off balance – we’ve got to bring that back into balance because it’s not serving the interests of the American people well.
So it doesn’t have to come at the expense of others, but it does have to come at an engagement with others. And so as we’re building our policies around those notions, that’s what we want to support. But at the end of it, it is strengthening our national security and promoting economic prosperity for the American people, and we do that, again, with a lot of partners.
Now, I think it’s important to also remember that guiding all of our foreign policy actions are our fundamental values: our values around freedom, human dignity, the way people are treated. Those are our values. Those are not our policies; they’re values. And the reason it’s important, I think, to keep that well understood is policies can change. They do change. They should change. Policies change to adapt to the – our values never change. They’re constant throughout all of this.
And so I think the real challenge many of us have as we think about constructing our policies and carrying out our policies is: How do we represent our values? And in some circumstances, if you condition our national security efforts on someone adopting our values, we probably can’t achieve our national security goals or our national security interests.
If we condition too heavily that others must adopt this value that we’ve come to over a long history of our own, it really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests. It doesn’t mean that we leave those values on the sidelines. It doesn’t mean that we don’t advocate for and aspire to freedom, human dignity, and the treatment of people the world over. We do. And we will always have that on our shoulder everywhere we go.
But I think it is – I think it’s really important that all of us understand the difference between policy and values, and in some circumstances, we should and do condition our policy engagements on people adopting certain actions as to how they treat people. They should. We should demand that. But that doesn’t mean that’s the case in every situation. And so we really have to understand, in each country or each region of the world that we’re dealing with, what are our national security interests, what are our economic prosperity interests, and then as we can advocate and advance our values, we should – but the policies can do this; the values never change.
And so I would ask you to just – to the extent you could think about that a little bit, I think it’s useful, because I know this is probably, for me, it’s one of the most difficult areas as I’ve thought about how to formulate policy to advance all of these things simultaneously. It’s a real challenge. And I hear from government leaders all over the world: You just can’t demand that of us, we can’t move that quickly, we can’t adapt that quickly, okay?
So it’s how do we advance our national security and economic interests on this hand, our values are constant over here.
So I give you that as kind of an overarching view of how I think about the President’s approach of “America first.” We must secure the nation. We must protect our people. We must protect our borders. We must protect our ability to be that voice of our values now and forevermore. And we can only do that with economic prosperity.
So it’s foreign policy projected with a strong ability to enforce the protection of our freedoms with a strong military. And all of you that have been at this a long time understand the value of speaking with a posture of strength – not a threatening posture, but a posture of strength. People know we can back it up.
So with that in mind, let me just quickly walk around the world and give you my assessment of where we are in some of the early stages of policy that’s underway and some that’s yet to be developed.
So as all of you clearly understand, when we came in to the State Department, the administration came in, was sworn in, immediately confronted with a serious situation in North Korea. Now, the prior administration, as all of you know, President Obama told President Trump this was going to be your greatest threat that you’re going to have to manage, and he was right.
♦ So it was – it’s right on the doorstep. And so it got immediate attention. It was the first policy area that we began to develop in terms of what is our overarching strategic approach and how do we want to execute against that. In evaluating that, what was important to us and to me to understand was, first, where are our allies? And so engaging with our allies and ensuring that our allies and we see the situation the same – our allies in South Korea, our allies in Japan.
And then, secondly, it was to engage with the other regional powers as to how do they see it. And so it was useful and helpful to have the Chinese and now the Russians articulate clearly that their policy is unchanged; they – their policy is a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. And of course we did our part many years ago. We took all the nuclear weapons out of South Korea. So now we have a shared objective, and that’s very useful, from which you then build out your policy approaches and your strategies.
So many people are saying, well, gee, this is just the same thing we’ve tried over and over – we’re going to put pressure on the regime in Pyongyang, they’re not going to do anything, and then in the end we’ll all cave. Well, the difference, I think, in our approach this time is we’re going to test this assumption, and when the – when folks came in to review the situation with me, the assumption was that China has limited influence on the regime in Pyongyang, or they have a limited willingness to assert their influence. And so I told the President we’ve got to test that, and we’re going to test it by leaning hard into them, and this is a good place to start our engagement with China.
And so that’s what we’ve been doing, is leaning hard into China to test their willingness to use their influence, their engagement with the regime in North Korea. All of it backed up by very strong resolve on our part to have a denuclearized peninsula with a commitment to our security alliances on the peninsula and in the region to our important allies Japan and South Korea.
So it’s a pressure campaign that has a knob on it. I’d say we’re at about dial setting 5 or 6 right now, with a strong call of countries all over the world to fully implement the UN Security Council resolutions regarding sanctions, because no one has ever fully implemented those. So we’re going to lean into people to fully implement them. We’ve told them we’re watching what you’re doing. When we see you not implementing, we see companies or we see individuals that are violating these sanctions, we’re going to contact you and we’re going to ask you to take care of it. If you can’t take care of it or you simply don’t want to take care of it for your own internal political reasons, we will. We’ll sanction them through third-country sanctions.
So we are being very open and transparent about our intentions, and we’re asking our partners around the world to please take actions on your own. We want you to control how that happens. We’re not trying to control it for you, but we have an expectation of what you will do. So we’re putting that pressure on. We are preparing additional sanctions, if it turns out North Korea’s actions warrant additional sanctions. We’re hopeful that the regime in North Korea will think about this and come to a conclusion that there’s another way to the future. We know they have – they’re – they aspire to nuclear weapons because it’s the regime’s belief it’s the only way they can secure their future.
We are clear – we’ve been clear to them this is not about regime change, this is not about regime collapse, this is not about an accelerated reunification of the peninsula, this is not about us looking for an excuse to come north of the 38th Parallel. So we’re trying to be very, very clear and resolute in our message to them that your future security and economic prosperity can only be achieved through your following your commitments to denuclearize.
So this is where we are. We’re at – I would say we’re at about the 20 to 25 percent stage of this strategy. Thus far, our assessment is it is going like we had hoped for in terms of the response we’re getting from others, but we’ve got a lot of work left to do to keep that pressure on. And so that’s what the folks that are in the bureaus and out in the missions are doing to help us right now, is to continue this steady, resolute message and continue to talk out here to the North Koreans, but not here, yet, about what our intentions are and what we want. We are ready and prepared to engage in talks when conditions are right.
But as you’ve heard me say, we are not going to negotiate our way to the negotiating table. That is what Pyongyang has done for the last 20 years, is cause us to have to negotiate to get them to sit down. We’ll sit down when they’re ready to sit down under the right terms. So that’s North Korea.
♦ And then if I pivoted over to China, because it really took us directly to our China foreign policy, we really had to assess China’s situation, as I said, from the Nixon era up to where we find things today, and we saw a bit of an inflection point with the Sochi – with the Beijing Olympics. Those were enormously successful for China. They kind of put China on the map, and China really began to feel its oats about that time, and rightfully.
They have achieved a lot. They moved 500 million Chinese people out of poverty into middle class status. They’ve still got a billion more they need to move.
So China has its own challenges, and we want to work with them and be mindful of what they’re dealing with in the context of our relationship. And our relationship has to be one of understanding that we have security interests throughout northeast Asia and security interests throughout the Pacific, and we need to work with them on how those are addressed. So that gets to the island building in the South China Sea, the militarization of those islands, and obviously, we have huge trading issues to talk with them about.
So we are using the entree of the visit in Mar-a-Lago, which was heavy on some issues with North Korea but also heavy on a broader range of issues. And what we’ve asked the Chinese to do is we’re – we want to take a fresh look at where’s this relationship going to be 50 years from now, because I think we have an opportunity to define that. And so I know there have been a lot of dialogue areas that have been underway for the last several years with China. We have asked China to narrow the dialogue areas and elevate the participants to the decision-making level.
So we outlined four major dialogue areas with China, and we’ve asked them to bring people who report directly to the decision-maker, which is President Xi. So for the first time, we are seeking and we – so far it appears we will get people at the politburo level and at much higher levels of the government within China to participate in these dialogues so we can reframe what we want the relationship to be and begin to deal with some of the problems and issues that have just been sitting out there kind of stuck in neutral for a while. So it is a – it’s a much narrower – as we make progress, those things will result in working groups where we can get after solving these things.
