Secretary of State Rex Tillerson might not have his job for much longer,
but his tenure may well be regarded as the most consequential in postwar
American history: not for what he built but for what he destroyed.

In only ten months, Tillerson, the former C.E.O. of ExxonMobil, has
presided over the near-dismantling of America’s diplomatic corps,
chasing out hundreds of State Department employees and scaling back the
country’s engagement with the world. Most alarming has been the
departure of dozens of the foreign service’s most senior officials—men
and women who had spent their careers living and working abroad, who
speak several languages, and who are experts in their fields. As I
detailed in my recent Profile of Tillerson, he came into the job proposing to cut the State Department’s budget by a
third, with plans to eliminate more than a thousand jobs and
dramatically scale back the already measly sums America spends on
refugees, democracy promotion, women’s rights, and the prevention of
H.I.V. At the same time, the Trump Administration was proposing to
dramatically increase spending on defense—by fifty-eight billion
dollars, an amount that is larger than the State Department’s entire
budget.

Tillerson’s proposed cuts were so galling that even some
Republicans—Senators John McCain and Bob Corker, for instance—publicly
protested. At a Senate hearing earlier this year, Corker told Tillerson
that reading his proposed budget “was a total waste of time.” (In fact,
the current Congress, so far, has been not been able to pass Trump’s
budget.) In sum, Tillerson’s vision was of a vastly diminished role for
America in the world, and a more militarized one.

As far as I could gather, Tillerson doesn’t have much of an ideology,
apart from efficiency. As the C.E.O. of Exxon, Tillerson showed himself
willing to make deals with any regime or any dictator, no matter how
noxious the human-rights record or how corrupt, in order to secure more
oil. He shared caviar with Vladimir Putin in New York, lobbied to undo
sanctions against Iran, and set up subsidiaries that did business with
Syria, Iran, and Sudan, whose regimes were all under American sanctions.
When asked about these decisions, Tillerson did not seem much troubled
by doing deals that were wildly at odds with his country’s foreign
policy; Exxon, which operates in nearly as many countries as the State
Department, was too important for that. “I’m not here to represent the
United States government’s interest,’’ he told an audience in Texas
while still at Exxon. “I’m not here to defend it, nor here to criticize
it. That’s not what I do. I’m a businessman.”

It’s tempting to have some sympathy for Tillerson, given the boss he
works for. President Trump seems to change his foreign policy daily,
threatening war with North Korea one day, trashing NATO the next, or
passing highly classified intelligence to Russian officials the day
after that. When Tillerson travelled to China to try to search for a
peaceful resolution to the nuclear crisis in North Korea, the President
tweeted that Tillerson was “wasting his time.” “Save your energy, Rex.
We’ll do what has to be done,” the President said. Shortly after his
return, Tillerson, in a meeting with White House officials, was heard
calling Trump a “fucking moron.”

Similarly, it’s tempting to buy into the popular notion that Tillerson
(along with Secretary of Defense James Mattis; the President’s chief of
staff, John Kelly; and the national-security adviser, H. R. McMaster) is
one of the “adults in the room,” preventing the President from acting
even more egregiously than he already has. What has Trump been prevented
from doing? We don’t know what we don’t know, but the evidence is not
encouraging. Tillerson has been humiliated by President Trump; even so,
he has doggedly carried on with the President’s most radical policies.

Which brings us to Tillerson’s legacy. In the broadest sense, the world
we live in was created by the United States. The architecture of
international economic and political relations—the United Nations, NATO,
the World Trade Organization, and so on—was largely drawn up by American
diplomats at the end of the Second World War. The system they devised
was meant to encourage the spread of free markets and liberal democracy,
and it was premised, more than anything, on American leadership. It’s
easy to trash the idea of American global leadership, imperfect and
unjust as it has been. But what would the world be without it? Thanks in
no small part to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, we are about to find
out.