If Rex Tillerson is nominated as the next secretary of state, it would confirm Vladimir Putin as one of the strategic victors of the US presidential election.
Barack Obama has ordered an inquiry into covert Russian intervention in the campaign, which the CIA says was designed to secure a victory for Donald Trump. But whether or not Russian intervention made a significant difference to the outcome, a Tillerson appointment would represent a significant gain for Moscow.
While the other leading candidates for the job hold largely traditional and adversarial views on Russia, the outgoing chief executive of Exxon Mobil has a history of close business ties to Putin, who bestowed the Order of Friendship on Tillerson in 2013.
The Wall Street Journal reported: “Friends and associates said few US citizens are closer to Mr Putin than Mr Tillerson.”
The 64-year-old Texas oilman spent much of his career working on Russian deals, including a 2011 agreement giving Exxon Mobil access to the huge resources under the Russian Arctic in return for giving the giant state-owned Russian oil company, OAO Rosneft, the opportunity to invest in Exxon Mobil’s operations overseas.
Tillerson is also friends with the head of Rosneft, Igor Sechin, a former interpreter who worked as chief of staff for Putin when he was deputy mayor in St Petersburg in the mid-1990s. Sechin, sometimes described as the second-most-powerful man in Russia, is now under US sanctions. He has said that one of his ambitions is to “ride the roads in the United States on motorcycles with Tillerson”.
The 2011 Exxon-Rosneft agreement was frozen when sanctions were imposed on Russia in 2014, following the annexation of Crimea and covert military intervention in eastern Ukraine. Exxon Mobil estimated the sanctions cost it $1bn and Tillerson has argued strenuously for the measures to be lifted.
“We always encourage the people who are making those decisions to consider the very broad collateral damage of who are they really harming with sanctions,” he said, at a shareholders’ meeting.
In June, two years after sanctions were imposed and in an apparent show of support for Sechin, Tillerson reportedly turned up at a St Petersburg economic summit.
If the sanctions were lifted, the Arctic project would probably go ahead and Tillerson’s retirement fund of Exxon Mobil stock would increase in value. He would most likely have to divest himself of stock by the time he entered the office on the seventh floor of the state department. It might be harder to divorce his judgments entirely from the oil company where he spent his career.
“Trump’s choice of Rex Tillerson suggests he wants to make good on his promise to cut deals with Russia instead of containing it,” said Thomas Wright, who has written extensively on Trump’s foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.
“Tillerson has a relationship with Putin and he opposed the sanctions imposed on Russia after the annexation of Crimea. This will alarm those worried about Russian intentions in Europe.”
Praising Tillerson in an interview with Fox News Sunday, Trump said: “To me a great advantage is that he knows many of the players in the world and he knows them well.”
Lest there be any doubt about which players the president-elect had in mind, Trump added: “He does massive deals in Russia not for himself, but for the company.”
‘A culture of intimidation’
In a very real sense, Tillerson has been a head of a state within a state. Exxon Mobil is bigger economically than many countries. It has its own foreign policy and its own contracted security forces.
As a state, it has much in common with the one run by Putin and Sechin.
“Reporting on Exxon was not only harder than reporting on the Bin Ladens, it was harder than reporting on the CIA by an order of magnitude,” said Steve Coll, who wrote about the company in a book, Private Empire.
“They have a culture of intimidation that they bring to bear in their external relations, and it is plenty understood inside the corporation too. They make people nervous, they make people afraid,” Coll, now a journalism professor at Columbia University, told Texas Monthly.
Running the state department would not be like running Exxon Mobil, however. For a start, Tillerson would have to audition in front of a sceptical Senate. On Saturday, leading Democrats were painting him as a Moscow stooge.
The New Jersey senator Bob Menendez said on Twitter: “Rex Tillerson as secretary of state would guarantee Russia has a willing accomplice in the president’s cabinet.”
With a slim 52-48 majority, it would only take three Republican senators in revolt to cast Tillerson’s job in doubt. He would face aggressive questioning from Republican foreign policy hawks, led by John McCain.
“I have obviously concerns about his relationship with Vladimir Putin, who is a thug and a murderer, but obviously we will have hearings on that issue and other issues concerning him will be examined and then it’s the time to make up your mind on whether to vote yes or no,” the Arizona senator told CNN on Saturday.
McCain’s former chief of staff, Mark Salter, was far more blunt on Twitter. “Tillerson would sell out Nato for Sakhalin oil and his pal, Vlad,” he wrote. “Should be a rough confirmation hearing, and a no vote on the Senate floor.”
Even if Tillerson were to be confirmed, he would not take over the state department with a free hand to rewrite policy. He would face a striking culture clash with the institution, the bastion of foreign policy orthodoxy, which would have an ally in the secretary of defence nominee, retired general James Mattis, who is likely to oppose any erosion of Nato solidarity in the face of Moscow’s assertiveness in Europe.
Nevertheless, Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Endowment Moscow Center, argued: “Tillerson as secretary of state would signify the greatest discontinuity in US foreign policy since the end of the cold war.
“Not just in US-Russian relations: a Trump-Tillerson foreign policy would be squarely focused on US national interests, rather than on its global pretensions or any ideology.”
Trenin added: “It would be hard-nosed and no-nonsense, not averse to the use of force, but in response to a real rather than imaginary threat. In one word: realist.”
That is a change that would be undoubtedly be welcomed by Putin, whose vision of foreign policy centres on spheres of interest controlled by global powers, run by strongmen like himself.
Andrei Kozyrev, a former Russian foreign minister, argued that the Kremlin should be careful what it wishes for.
“The paradoxical situation now is that Russia is hoping for a US foreign policy based on realpolitik rather than on values, but that would be a disaster for Russia,” said Kozyrev, who is now at the Wilson Center thinktank in Washington.
“Why? Because the only interest America has in ending the conflicts in eastern Ukraine … or in Syria is actually in American values … that America should be concerned and do everything to alleviate the humanitarian situation and they should help nations to find their path to democracy.
“The realpolitik situation is that Russia is stuck in both military conflicts. If you look at this with a cold eye, you say: ‘Let them go on and let them enjoy the disaster they have in eastern Ukraine,’” Kozyrev said.
“Look at Syria. By realpolitik the Americans would rather sit and wait while Russia draws on its resources and gets into bloody conflict.”