TILLERSON’S NATO TRIP BACK ON: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will attend the big NATO foreign ministers confab in Brussels after all, after the alliance rescheduled the ministerial for March 31 to accommodate Tillerson’s schedule. Tillerson was juggling important meetings about North Korea with China’s president Xi Jinping set for next early next month at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. The NATO trip will now take place one day after he travels to Turkey, a NATO ally that has had fraught relations with the United States and European countries in recent months. “Secretary Tillerson will reaffirm Turkey’s important role in ensuring regional stability, and he will discuss the way forward with our campaign to defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq,” the State Department bulletin said.

At the German Marshall Fund’s Brussels Forum over the weekend, Sen. Ron Johnson said Tillerson made clear during a recent lunch with members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he always wanted to attend, and it was just a matter of clearing up scheduling conflicts. “He certainly made this point to us that there was no slight,” Johnson said at news conference in Brussels. “There was nothing intended from that standpoint whatsoever. It’s just strictly a scheduling conflict.” Sen. John McCain, who was also attending the conference in Belgium, attributed the snafu to Tillerson’s lack of support staff. “Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a team there at the State Department, and I think it’s incumbent for the president and the administration to get people nominated and confirmed,” McCain said. “You can’t expect the secretary of state to conduct all his calendar appointments.”