It turns out that staffing an entire government with rich people you know from your golf outings will not, despite how wonderful it sounded when you were describing it to your third butler, usher in a brand new era of national greatness. It is instead a recipe for international bungles as your new, completely inexperienced cabinet members flub things they didn't even know could be flubbed.
After meeting China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Saturday, [Secretary of State Rex Tillerson] voiced Chinese catchphrases about the relationship, including the avoidance of conflict and confrontation and the need to build “mutual respect” and strive for “win-win” cooperation.
The phrase “mutual respect” is key: In Beijing, that is taken to mean each side should respect the other’s “core interests.”
Why is that important, you ask? Because what China sees as core interests are a set of key subjects, from Taiwan to territorial disputes to human rights concerns, on which they have long demanded the United States uniformly butt out. The United States has, in the past, disagreed. Tillerson's public use of Chinese government-backed talking points is being seen by Chinese officials as a signal that Trump-based foreign policy will be bending more towards their own point of view, and Chinese media lavished praise on Tillerson for making what is seen as an important concession.
While Tillerson is being praised by Chinese state media for his statement, however, foreign policy watchers here at home don’t know whether Tillerson is really making an intentional show of compliance to those Chinese demands or simply doesn't know what the hell he is doing. It's anybody's guess!
“Tillerson’s remarks were probably an effort to provide Xi face in public, while behind doors, the conversation was probably more direct,” said Walter Lohman, director of the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation. “At least I hope so. Because, assuming Xi paraphrased Tillerson accurately, it is certainly not true that ‘the China-U.S. relationship can only be defined by cooperation and friendship.’ ”
Nevertheless, Tillerson appears to have given ground to Beijing in a way that the Obama administration had studiously avoided doing.
Note that Rex Tillerson still doesn't have any top staff to speak of—the White House hasn't been able to find candidates to fill out that staff due in part to their insistence that personal loyalty to Donald Trump be a make-or-break criteria—and White House distrust for State Department experts means that Tillerson probably has nobody preparing him for these trips who can even tell him what the recent history of the Chinese-United States relationship might be or what pitfalls he might, without knowing that history, be falling into. He doesn't know, Trump doesn't know, nobody knows. They're winging this.
They also seem to be winging their anti-terrorism plans, their anti-refugee plans, the Syrian war, North Korean missile tests, Russian military acts in Europe, NATO, and whatever else pops up between golf weekends. So far it's resulted mostly in diplomatic embarrassments as both our own foreign policy experts and those in every other country try to parse out whether each move is intentional or simply incompetence. At some point there may be an international crisis in which quick and competent action matters, and at that point we're probably all screwed.