WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump’s two-week blitz of national security initiatives has shaken up world affairs, but Washington’s own foreign policy headquarters has fallen all but silent.

While daily White House news conferences have become must-see political theatre, the State Department has not held a press briefing since the day before Trump’s inauguration.

The agency now has a chief diplomat, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, but many of its senior posts remain unfilled and the oilman’s daily business passes without public comment.

Of course, all US presidents set their own national security agenda, which is then executed by State, the Pentagon and America’s alphabet soup of intelligence agencies.

But the detail and day-to-day management of foreign policy, not to mention the job of explaining and defending the policy to press and public, falls on State and the diplomatic corps.

On Tuesday, 18 days after Trump’s inauguration and six days after Tillerson was sworn in, State still had no chief spokesperson and no firm plans to resume daily briefings.

Acting spokesman Mark Toner, a career officer who was deputy spokesman under the previous administration, said there are no plans for this to change before at least the end of the week.

“We continue to work with the interagency and the White House, and look to resume daily press briefings at the soonest possible time,” he told AFP.

When Tillerson arrived for work at Foggy Bottom on Thursday, he gave a well-received speech to around 2,000 his new staff stressing his respect for their expertise and patriotism.

But he made no comment on policy and has made none since.

Trump, meanwhile, held hands with Britain’s prime minister, clashed with Australia’s and made the first call in what he hopes will be beautiful friendship with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

His ban on refugee arrivals and suspension of visas for visitors from seven mainly Muslim countries sent shockwaves around the world before a US court stepped in to halt it.

When Tillerson’s weekly public schedule was released over the weekend, every day was simply marked: “Secretary Tillerson attends meetings and briefings at the Department of State.” Since then, one event has been added, a meeting with Trump at the White House on Tuesday where he believed to have discussed the appointment of a deputy to help run the agency.

Tillerson has been in telephone contact with allied foreign ministers such as those from Australia, Japan and South Korea.

But the traditional press office readout of the calls came the next day, and contained little detail.

When Israeli lawmakers voted on Monday to legalise settlements on occupied Palestinian land, the low-key US response was issued late in the day by an anonymous “State Department official”.

This may be frustrating for journalists, but does it matter? After all Trump — Tillerson’s boss and US commander-in-chief — and his staff keep up a raucous, daily public conversation through news events, speeches and belligerent tweetstorms.

Staff at the State Department and US missions around the world are wary of speaking out, but their frustration is growing. Around 1,000 staffers signed a memo condemning Trump’s refugee policy.

Radio silence

When then president George W Bush and his secretary of State Colin Powell took power in 2001, and when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton arrived in 2009, State was briefing within days.

Jeff Rathke, who served as director of the State Department press office between 2014 and 2015, said there are two reasons why the agency’s current radio silence is a worry.

“First, the White House has to speak to domestic as well as international issues, so there is a limit to how much foreign policy content the White House spokesman can address in a briefing,” he told AFP.

“And second, there are numerous issues every day around the world, great and small, that affect US interests,” he argued. “If the United States does not take opportunities to address them publicly, it can miss a chance to influence them.”

In the meantime, after a blizzard of controversial and sometimes contradictory statements and executive orders from Trump’s White House, the wider world has many questions.—AFP

Published in Dawn February 9th, 2017