North Korea Summit Leads to Removal of Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State

Rex Tillerson has been rumored for quite some time to be on thin ice with President Trump.  Apparently the agreement to a summit between Kim Jong-un and President Trump is what has caused his firing:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was fired on Twitter after returning from an Africa trip in which he was out of the loop on North Korean talks and contradicted the White House position on Russia’s responsibility for poisoning a British spy.

In other words, his last week on the job was just like any other.

In his 14-month tenure as the nation’s top diplomat, Tillerson often found himself trying to interpret President Trump’s mercurial and contradictory foreign policy to the rest of the world.

He reassured NATO allies that the United States remained committed to the alliance even after the president threatened to pull out over “dues” that Trump believed were owed directly to the United States. (They weren’t.)

He tried to salvage the Iran nuclear deal through a European-brokered fix to the Obama-era agreement, rather than having Trump scuttle the deal completely.

Trump specifically cited differences over the Iran deal Tuesday. “I thought it was terrible, I guess, he feels it was OK.”

Now, Trump is heading into an unprecedented face-to-face meeting with North Korea’sKim Jong Un over that country’s nuclear program. The timing of the move was designed to allow Trump to put a new team in place in advance of those talks, said a White House official speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a personnel decision.  [USA Today]

You can read more at the link, but Tillerson late last week undercut Trump in regards to the upcoming summit:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appeared Friday to undercut President Donald Trump’s expected meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, stressing that only “talks” rather than “negotiations” would take place when the two men sit down sometime in the coming months.

Tillerson, who has clashed with Trump and seen his own work on North Korea publicly admonished by the president, did not clarify his distinction between talks and negotiations when speaking with the Associated Press.  [Newsweek]

CIA director Mike Pompeo is taking over for Tillerson if confirmed by the Senate.  This would give him about two months to put together the summit with Kim Jong-un.