With apologies to Cat Stevens, aka Yusuf Islam.
Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon CEO whom Donald Trump has picked for Secretary of State, has made a lot of comments and taken a lot of positions in favor of free trade. That’s not unusual for a Secretary of State. When I was at the Council of Economic Advisers under Martin Feldstein, I read pretty much every memo written by pretty much every senior economist. (The “Weekly Reader” contained all the memos.) The Council was virtually always (I can’t think of an exception) on the side of free trade or at least on the side of the freest trade they thought they could get. The senior economist for trade, Geoffrey O. Carliner (see here at p. 153) was regularly writing memos about interagency meetings he was attending on trade issues. Over 80%–and it might have been over 90%–of the time, the State Department was one of the CEA’s closest allies. (Also good on free trade were the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget.)
But there is one area on which the State Department has been very bad on trade and that is when it supports sanctions on countries whose governments conduct policies that the U.S. government doesn’t like.
Rex Tillerman appears to have a consistent opponent of such sanctions. My antiwar.com colleague Justin Raimondo writes:
Exxon is one of the principal supporters of USA Engage, a business lobby that has for years argued against Iranian and Iraqi sanctions, and that believes in “positively engaging other societies through diplomacy, multilateral cooperation, the presence of American organizations,” and that “the best practices of American companies and humanitarian exchanges better advances U.S. objectives than punitive unilateral economic sanctions.”
That’s refreshing.
Of course, we don’t know whether he opposes sanctions on principle or simply because they were bad for his company. For evidence that he takes positions based on self-interest rather than principle, see this.
We shall see. We will also see how well or badly Tillerson controls the worst instincts of his putative deputy, John Bolton.
READER COMMENTS
EB
Dec 14 2016 at 1:33pm
Tillerson or Tillerman?
Michael Rulle
Dec 14 2016 at 4:56pm
Tea for the Tillerman
Interesting description of Tillerson’s trade views.I am glad to hear about it.
Re: Bolton. For sure he is as an aggressive a neo-con as there is. I see no problem having one of them in the State Department. We tend to have too many salesmen in State. Think of it as Good Cop Bad Cop. Plus he is number 2, because no one in their right mind would ever give him the top spot.
He is more than offset By Mattis in Defense.
Andrew_FL
Dec 14 2016 at 7:35pm
@Michael Rulle-libertarians really need to stop calling every hawk a neocon. It’s really quite historically illiterate and intellectually lazy.
I’m pretty sure Tillerson is not a principled opponent of sanctions, but I’m far more worried that he wants to just let Putin resurrect Imperial Russia than that he won’t fight against the status quo on sanctions policy.
E. Harding
Dec 14 2016 at 10:16pm
Andrew, I do not recommend paranoia in this situation. Does the U.S. control other countries’ military spending now?
What are the primary differences between the views of Bolton and the neocons’?
ee
Dec 14 2016 at 11:40pm
Dave,
The sanctions are targeted. Where do you stand on targeted sanctions vs country-wide sanctions?
What if any response would you have made to the Russian invasion of Ukraine? There are still Russian forces deployed there and there have been ~8k deaths and several thousand more wounded over the life of the conflict.
Do you think Russian hacks of US leaders of both parties and targeted and doctored dumps of the spoils from those hacks should affect the decision to end targeted sanctions?
Andrew_FL
Dec 15 2016 at 9:29am
@E. Harding-I don’t think I’m going to listen to you tell me not to be “paranoid”
For one thing, the original Neoconservatives were not against institutions like the United Nations, something Bolton has more in common with the Old Right.
Hawkery has existed for all of history, Neoconservativism is a particular variety associated with ex-leftists from the Cold War era. Of course, today’s Doves have bastardized the term as if it and Hawk were interchangeable.
Thaomas
Dec 15 2016 at 6:23pm
Would “positively engaging other societies through diplomacy, multilateral cooperation, the presence of American organizations,” and that “the best practices of American companies and humanitarian exchanges better advances U.S. objectives than punitive unilateral economic sanctions”have gotten us the Iran deal?
d clark
Dec 16 2016 at 1:42am
So. Free Trade (and is the Free Trade under discussion here a moving target that varies according to trade deals, tariffs, subsidies, etc?) is Untouchable when it comes to furthering America’s interests for a more peaceful, prosperous nation?
David R. Henderson
Dec 16 2016 at 10:46am
@d clark,
I don’t understand your question. Please word it more clearly.
Neil Wilson
Dec 16 2016 at 4:10pm
Just a quick note.
Exxon underperformed both the S&P 500 and outer major oil companies, with the exception of BP, during the time Tillerson was CEO.
Just sayin’
Comments are closed.