Rex Tillerson (shown) may soon be out as secretary of state. Rumors began circulating on Thursday that President Trump would be firing the former Exxon Mobil CEO, who has been at odds with much of the agenda that Trump campaigned on: global warming and the UN Paris climate accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, foreign wars, China relations, NAFTA, immigration, and more.
Reuters reported on Thursday that “U.S. President Donald Trump is considering a plan to oust Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has had a strained relationship with his boss over North Korea and other issues,” according to unnamed “senior administration officials.” “Tillerson would be replaced by CIA director Mike Pompeo, known as a Trump loyalist,” according to the Reuters story, which was echoed by reports from other news organizations. The replacement is said to be coming “within weeks under a White House plan to carry out the most significant staff shakeup so far of the Trump administration.”
Tillerson’s removal would be heartily applauded by all supporters of Trump’s “America First” inclination, since Tillerson clearly represents the opposite orientation, especially as it relates to that ultimate bastion of world government internationalism the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). We noted last March in our report on the Trump-Tillerson adoption of Communist Beijing’s “One China” doctrine (slamming our Free China ally, Taiwan) and the administration’s support of expanded U.S.-China “trade” (More Dangerous China Trade? Globalist Push vs. Trump Promise) that Tillerson, “while not a CFR member, has nonetheless been active as a speaker and participant at CFR events, a search of the Council’s website shows.” Moreover, “he has been endorsed or given high marks by CFR heavyweights and China Lobby stalwarts such as Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, and Dick Cheney. All of these developments stack up as decidedly unfavorable signs for those who are expecting (or hoping for) major reversals in our decades of disastrous polices regarding China.”
In his maiden speech before the Council, on March 9, 2007, Tillerson stated: “Although this is my first time speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations, from a historical perspective, it feels a little bit like home. Some of you may or may not know the building we’re in was once the private residence of Harold Pratt, who was a former director of the Standard Oil Company. I also feel at home because the Council was founded on a number of beliefs that I share and that I trust most of you do, as well, and that is the belief in the promise of international engagement and in the potential for global approaches to meeting this nation’s challenges.”
Tillerson expanded on what those beliefs are by quoting CFR founding member Elihu Root, from the CFR journal Foreign Affairs. “In the very first issue of Foreign Affairs,” Tillerson observed, “statesman and founding Council member Elihu Root wrote, and I quote, ‘No nation whose citizens trade and travel need consider whether it will be a member of the community of nations. It is compelled by the situation. Because of this,’ he said, ‘there is a pressing demand for popular education in international affairs.’ Now, Root wrote this at a time when Americans were debating whether to choose an isolationist foreign policy or an internationalist one. The Council on Foreign Relations advocated the latter, and thankfully, this view eventually carried the day.”
Elihu Root, the consummate Wall Street establishment insider, was among the most important leaders of the push for world government at the end of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th. He is known mostly for having served as secretary of war (1899-1904) and secretary of state (1905-1909), but it was his lesser known close association with the CFR (of which he was honorary president from its founding until his death in 1937) and two of the planet’s wealthiest men, Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan, that really defined the man. Carnegie was one of the early apostles of the world-government gospel, and Root served as chairman and/or president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Carnegie Institution. These Carnegie operations showered lavish funds on propagandists and organizations (including the CFR) promoting this cause. Ostensibly a Republican, Root was, nevertheless, a backer of (Democratic) President Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for the League of Nations. Using Carnegie money, he helped launch the Hague Academy of International Law and the American Law Institute, both of which have labored to undermine national sovereignty and America’s constitutional checks and balances.
Root and his fellow internationalists contemptuously referred to American nationalists — that is, patriots and constitutionalists — as “isolationists,” a completely false designation, since virtually no nationalist advocated for isolation from the rest of the world. Nationalists simply demanded that our political leaders abide by their oaths to the Constitution and not subject Americans to foreign laws and internationalist schemes for global control. That Tillerson felt led to inform his CFR audience that he is in sync with Elihu Root’s internationalist philosophy is telling indeed.
Tillerson and the CFR-Obama-UN Paris Climate Deal
Among the many internationalist issues that Secretary Tillerson has weighed in on during his first year in the Trump administration, his handling of the UN Paris Climate Accord may be the one that most exemplifies his commitment to the CFR’s globalist agenda.
The New American has pointed out in many previous articles (see, for example, here and here) that the CFR has been the premier brain trust pushing the panic over the nonexistent “crisis” of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, or AGW. CFR President Richard Haass, whom Tillerson thanked at the beginning of his speech at the Council’s Pratt House headquarters in New York City, is a full-throated champion of efforts to empower the United Nations, with the UN Paris deal being one of the CFR’s most ambitious efforts to date. As renowned meteorologist/climatologist and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dr. Richard Lindzen puts it: “Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon, you control life.” And if you control the world’s carbon, you control all life on earth. What’s for a bureaucrat or a globalist cabal not to love about that?
Thus, there was much justifiable rejoicing on June 1 when President Trump announced that “as of today, the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country.” But the hallelujahs and huzzahs were premature. As The New American pointed out, the Trump administration’s announced cessation of implementation has left the United States in a hazardous position. Previously, President Trump, like many other critics, had rightly charged that President Obama’s “ratification” by executive decree is unconstitutional, and therefore invalid, since it did not submit it to the Senate, as required by our Constitution. As such, it is null and void. However, while rejecting the Paris treaty itself, the Trump administration then illogically and incoherently elected to abide by the invalid agreement’s stipulation that we must remain technically “in” the deal until after our next presidential election.
Swamp Creatures Still Run Foggy Bottom
This situation led Forbes writer Dave Keating to author a piece on November 19 entitled “It Looks Like The U.S. May Never Leave The Paris Climate Accord.” Keating observes: “Donald Trump may have vowed to take the United States out of the Paris climate accord, but you wouldn’t have known it based on the words of the negotiators he sent to the summit in Bonn to hammer out the rules of the agreement.”
Keating quotes Judith Garber, the U.S. acting assistant secretary of state for international environmental and scientific affairs (and the lead U.S. negotiator at Bonn), stating, among other things: “Although [President Trump] indicated that the United States intends to withdraw at the earliest opportunity, we remain open to the possibility of rejoining at a later date under terms more favorable to the American people.” Garber, a holdover from the Obama-Clinton State Department, is but one of many climate activists populating the federal bureaucracy. Tillerson has left many of the Obama-Clinton-Kerry veterans who played major roles in negotiating and drafting the illegal Obama-UN deal still in place. There definitely has been none of the promised draining of the swamp at Foggy Bottom (as the State Department is affectionately known); the swamp creatures are still in charge.
“By the end of the summit,” noted Keating, “many were beginning to suspect that this will not be a question of re-joining. The U.S. may never leave in the first place.” “When Donald Trump announced his decision in June,” Keating writes, “observers noted that out of several options to take the U.S. out of the accord, he chose the one that would take the longest. He could have declared Barack Obama’s decision to not put the agreement to the U.S. Congress (by not deeming it a ‘treaty’) to have been invalid. The Congress could have then rejected the agreement, taking the US out right away.”
“Instead,” Keating continued, “the Trump administration chose to go through the official process of withdrawal, which takes more than three years. The ‘earliest opportunity’ referred to by Garber just happens to be the day after the next U.S. presidential election in 2020. In the meantime, the US will continue sending delegates to take their seat at the table, ‘in order to ensure a level playing field that benefits and protects U.S. interests,’ according to a State Department official.”
At the two-week-long UN climate conference that took place recently in Bonn, Germany, most news coverage in the United States focused on America’s “pariah status” due to President Trump’s announced pullout of the Paris deal. But there were plenty of indications that the Tillerson State Department was pushing forward. “While one group of American officials led by White House adviser George David Banks raised eyebrows by hosting a pro-coal event during the talks, a second group consisting of seasoned U.S. negotiators quietly got on with the painstaking job of refining the international climate rulebook, said Elliot Diringer, a veteran of such U.N. meetings,” the Associated Press reported on November 17. “It’s a smaller team but a strong team,” said Diringer, who is the executive vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a Washington think tank. “From all accounts they have been playing a constructive role in the room advancing largely the same positions as before.”
Apparently these folks didn’t get the memo from the president to “cease implementation” of their former boss’s scheme. Either that or Tillerson (or perhaps Tillerson and Trump) are knowingly looking the other way while these underlings ignore the announced position of their current boss. Maybe there are other explanations for why the State Department continues “advancing largely the same positions as before,” even though the president has said they would impose “draconian” conditions on Americans.
But there is much more troubling news on this score at Foggy Bottom. As we reported on November 18, Tillerson’s State Department is stonewalling an effort by attorneys for the Competitive Enterprise Institute to pry loose e-mails from the Obama-Clinton State Department communicating intentions of President Obama illegally to circumvent the U.S. Constitution, in order to saddle America with the invalid Paris accord as a done deal. Why is Tillerson protecting Obama and the dangerous UN Paris accord that his putative boss, President Trump, has publicly denounced and repudiated? The Competitive Enterprise Institute has been forced to sue the Trump administration in order to get the Obama-Clinton documents that Team Trump/Tillerson should be more than happy to provide — expeditiously.
Tillerson is part of the Deep State effort that is sabotaging the Trump administration from within. However, getting rid of Tillerson and replacing him with CIA’s Mike Pompeo doesn’t guarantee that the Deep State swamp creatures will disappear down the drain. As Warren Mass reports, Pompeo brings baggage of his own that will trouble Americans concerned about our rapidly eroding liberties. Most especially of concern are Pompeo’s tendencies to support the invasive and promiscuous use of surveillance methods and technologies by U.S. intelligence agencies against Americans — always in the name of national security, of course. Similar concerns extend to the man whose name is most being mentioned as a replacement for Pompeo at CIA: Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.). Senator Cotton, a hawkish neoconservative, has also shown that he fails to appreciate the limitations on federal power specified by our Constitution, which he has sworn to uphold and defend.
While the ousting of Tillerson would be a positive step forward, the D.C. swamp draining has barely begun, and Foggy Bottom, like the rest of the federal septic field, is still brimming with swamp creatures.
Photo of Rex Tillerson: U.S. Department of State
Related articles:
CFR Pushes End to Sovereignty at UN’s Doha Climate Summit
Crying Wolf (Again): UN Chief Warns Global Warming Is “The Defining Threat Of Our Time”
State Dept. Sued for Secret Records on UN Paris Climate Accord
Trump May Replace Rex Tillerson With Hawkish Mike Pompeo to Head State
Trump Was Right! UN Admits Paris “Climate” Scheme Is Useless
Climate Alarmists Go Hysterical as Their Theory Melts Down
What on Earth Is Happening to Our Temperature?
Top Climate Alarm “Scientist”: Get Rid of Cars, Coal, Steel — or Its End of the World
