This is a Cato Special Podcast. I'm Caleb Brown.

Rex Tillerson is out as Secretary of State.

Replacing him, maybe Mike Pompeo, currently head of of CIA and to replace Pompeo at CIA

Gina Haspel a long-time intelligence agent with a background that may pose problems

for her confirmation Cato's Chris Prevel and Emma Ashford discuss what these moves mean for diplomacy and

intelligence.

Chris Preble, what does it mean that Rex Tillerson is out at Secretary of State.

Well, I could be a little too cute and say he was never in.

Then there's a lot of truth to that.

Look, he never connected with the president,

he never connected with the staff at Foggi Bottom,

he never really connected with the diplomatic corps more broadly.

He came into that position with certain ideas about how a business is run based on his experience with one very very

large country company excuse me and I think that he sort of got off on the wrong foot with lots of people who might have helped him along the way

But the most important thing is that he never connected with Donald Trump and and when you look at, at least on paper, leaving aside the fact that Exxon is a very controversial

company to a lot of people, on paper you look at the kind of things that somebody as Secretary of State would have to do.

Yeah, when I said country and it's sort of that was a Freudian slip, I mean, you know, ExxonMobil is the equivalent of many countries, you know, in terms of output and just staff and, you know, this is a massive, you know, operation on virtually every continent on the planet and he in that position had famously or

infamously interacted with many world leaders including of course Vladimir

Putin so you know there it was not it was not crazy to think that a

business person especially him could succeed at state but I think we learned that it's a lot harder than he

thought and he didn't get off to the he didn't get off to a very good start by sort of leading with a major

reorganization as well as of course don't forget he you know the Trump administration proposed a 30% cut in the

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