On Thursday “senior administration officials” told leading US outlets that a plan had been drawn up to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, with conservative “hawk” Representative Tom Cotton taking over at the CIA.
So are the wheels in motion to push out Tillerson, given the revelation of his description of Donald Trump as a “f****** moron” — or maybe because Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner wants more leeway in his ad hoc missions on foreign policy, including encouragement of a tough regional policy by Saudi Arabia?
Or is a warning being given to Tillerson, who may have stepped back from his earlier intention to resign at the end of 2017, to play nice and not get in the way of Kushner or other Administration officials?
And — whatever the situation — has the Trump Administration’s foreign policy and diplomacy moved from the disfunctional to the dangerous?
I talked through the possibilities with Monocle 24’s The Briefing and with Austria’s Radio FM4 on Friday.
