U.S. diplomats can weather the surprises caused by President Trump’s use of Twitter, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Tuesday.
“It’s part of the environment in which we work,” Tillerson told reporters Tuesday at the State Department press briefing. “We’ll adapt to it.”
Tillerson addressed Trump’s penchant for tweeting about foreign policy after a discussion of the U.S. posture toward China and North Korea. Trump has criticized China on social media repeatedly for failing to put more pressure on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, drawing mockery from Chinese state-run media.
Tillerson used a conciliatory tone on Tuesday. “We certainly don’t blame the Chinese for the situation in North Korea,” Tillerson said. “Only the North Koreans are to blame for the situation.”
That acknowledgement comes days after Trump attacked China’s handling of the North Korea nuclear weapons crisis. “I am very disappointed in China. Our foolish past leaders have allowed them to make hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade, yet they do NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk,” Trump tweeted.
It’s not the first time the president and the secretary of state have sounded different notes on foreign policy. Trump celebrated when Saudi Arabia led a bloc of Arab states into a diplomatic standoff with Qatar, even though the outburst pit U.S. partners against one another. Tillerson, by contrast, began trying to pressure Saudi Arabia to reconcile with the Qataris.
Tillerson said that U.S. diplomats can handle Trump’s tweets.
“There’s a lot of unexpected things that happen to us in the world of diplomacy, and we know how to adapt to that, we know how to work with it,” he said. “And so, I don’t view it as an obstacle, a hindrance, or as an assistance.”
That stoic reply is a bit different than Tillerson’s first public comments on the issue, when he assured senators during his confirmation hearing that he was comfortable with the president’s use of Twitter. “It would be my expectation that any way the president might choose to communicate, through whatever method, would be supportive of that policy we’d both agreed on,” Tillerson said in January.
He admitted the tweets are more surprising, six months into his tenure as the nation’s top diplomat.
“Whatever the president chooses to express, he expresses,” Tillerson said Tuesday. “And then that’s information to everybody, us included.”
