If Rex Tillerson is nominated, Russia could get some very unfortunate ideas

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/12/12/if-rex-tillerson-is-nominated-russia-could-get-some-very-unfortunate-ideas/?utm_term=.5ba806e3fc1a

Excerpts:

The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump is likely to nominate Rex Tillerson, chief executive of ExxonMobil, to be secretary of state. John R. Bolton, a hawkish Bush administration official and fierce supporter of the 2003 Iraq War, is in line to become the deputy secretary. (Perhaps Trump sincerely considered Mitt Romney, but he may alternatively have played him, defanging Romney as a critic.)

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Regardless of Tillerson’s personal virtues, his career at ExxonMobil raises significant questions. Others have covered Tillerson’s relations with Russia in great detail. In 2011, Tillerson negotiated a multibillion-dollar deal between Exxon and Russia to drill for oil, but that deal ran into trouble when Russia annexed Crimea and the Obama administration responded with sanctions on Russia. Tillerson was a vocal opponent of sanctions. It is perhaps not surprising that the Russian Duma applauds Tillerson’s candidacy. The recent controversies surrounding alleged Russian interference with the election add to concerns about Tillerson’s close relationship with key Russian politicians and leaders in the energy sector (the two tend to blend into each other).

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The nomination might send mixed signals to Russia

Political scientists might expect Trump’s nomination of Tillerson and other positive signals to Russia to be dangerously destabilizing, perhaps even leading to war, as Phil Arena of the University of Essex points out. Russia’s economy is unsustainable, meaning that Putin has increasingly staked his legitimacy on aggressive nationalism. Putin may interpret the nomination, and other signals from Trump, as suggesting that Trump will not defend states in Eastern Europe from Russian aggression.

If Putin faces declining popularity at any time during a Trump administration, he might decide to take further aggressive action in Eastern Europe, gambling that the United States and NATO will not respond with force. Trump would then face a terrible choice: compromise the integrity of American defense alliances or go to war with a nuclear power. In that kind of situation, we might want Trump’s top diplomatic adviser to have broader policy experience than a 41-year career at ExxonMobil.

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The nomination could damage U.S. legitimacy

Political scientists talk about the “liberal order” that the United States has helped to create, and argue that it helped reassure U.S. allies that they would neither be abandoned nor exploited. Moving ExxonMobil’s CEO to secretary of state will deepen the belief among many foreign audiences that American “order” is a thin veil for resource-hungry neocolonialism.

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