When Rex Tillerson bid the State Department farewell after a grueling and exhausting 10 months on the job, he left in a hurry. His short tenure as Secretary of State — one of the shortest in post-World War II history — certainly felt longer than it really was. If Tillerson found any joy in or took any satisfaction from the post, he didn’t show it. And quite frankly, by the time he put in his retirement papers, many in Washington, and in the State Department itself, were happy campers.
Tillerson’s tenure was largely inconsequential. There were no big achievements, no peace agreements signed on his watch, and no major Kissinger-esque diplomatic initiatives. But if a report this week by the Intercept is accurate, Tillerson’s most significant accomplishment may have been what he prevented — a military conflict between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on one side, and Qatar on the other.
According to the Intercept, Qatari intelligence discovered plans for a joint invasion of the island by Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, whose governments were putting the financial squeeze on their smaller Qatari neighbor to force a change in Doha’s regional behavior. Once Doha informed Tillerson of the plan, the secretary got on the phone and implored Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir to back away from military action. Tillerson also leaned on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to relay a similar message to his Gulf Arab colleagues.
The diplomatic intervention worked. There would be no Saudi-UAE takeover of Qatar and no internecine Gulf Arab bloodshed. But, according to the Intercept, Tillerson’s move “enraged Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and effective ruler of that country, according to the U.S. intelligence official and a source close to the Emirati royal family.” It may have even contributed to Tillerson’s ouster from the Trump administration; earlier reporting from veteran national security journalist Mark Perry for the American Conservative shed light on how despised Tillerson was among the anti-Qatar monarchies in the Gulf. Indeed, when Tillerson resigned, prominent advisers to the UAE royal family openly celebrated on Twitter.
So what does this episode say about Tillerson?
First, while Tillerson received a lot of flack and criticism from all corners of the foreign policy establishment on a number of issues — from his advocacy of State Department budget cuts to his lackadaisical hiring of senior officials in the bureaucracy — the former ExxonMobile CEO knew a disaster when he saw one. A Gulf invasion of Qatar would have been just that. The Gulf Cooperation Council may have never recovered from such an overt act of aggression. Iran would have full taken advantage of the intra-Gulf warfare, perhaps by fomenting another insurgency to pull their Saudi rivals into another expensive morass. And Washington would have been been put on the spot as to whether to sanction the Saudis and Emiratis for invading a neighbor in much the same way as Saddam Hussein swallowed Kuwait nearly 30 years earlier. Tillerson appears to have fended off catastrophe, saving Trump the trouble of prowling around for solutions to yet another war in the Arab world.
Second, this reporting shows there is a lot we still don’t know about Tillerson’s tenure. While this particular administration leaks like a sieve, it’s implausible that the American people have every detail. There may very well be more national security crises Tillerson helped alleviate before they got out of control; until he writes his memoirs or another tell-all insider account is released, we may never know the full extent of what happened behind the scenes.
Finally, we owe Tillerson some credit. While he was a terrible bureaucratic infighter and completely tone-deaf with his own rank-and-file, he also entered the State Department under very difficult circumstances. He worked for a president who cut him off at the knees and picked fights with him in public. And he also confronted an unprecedented amount of Monday morning quarterbacking and withering criticism inside and outside Washington from those who faulted him for everything that went wrong. It’s quite hard to administer the State Department when the person in the Oval Office can change foreign policy with a single tweet.
For Rex, who is back on a Texas ranch somewhere, this is all ancient history. But it must be a small dose of relief that he helped avert a crisis between America’s friends in the Gulf.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
