Rex W. Tillerson on Wednesday told a Senate committee weighing his nomination as secretary of state that he would push back hard against President Vladimir Putin’s effort to expand Russian influence from Ukraine to Syria to cyberspace. But in a rocky all-day hearing, Tillerson also found himself on the defensive when it came to Exxon Mobil’s lobbying activities and his reluctance to declare that some dictators were violators of human rights.

One especially sceptical Republican was Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, whose vote on the Foreign Relations Committee might well decide the fate of Tillerson, the former chief executive of Exxon.

In one contentious exchange with Rubio, who ran against President-elect Donald Trump last year for the Republican nomination, Tillerson rebuffed an effort to get him to describe Putin as a war criminal for ordering the bombing of civilians in Chechnya. “I would not use that term,” he said.

By the end of the day, Rubio would not commit to supporting Tillerson, saying he was “prepared to do what’s right,” even if it meant siding with Democrats, which would most likely result in a 11-10 committee vote against the nomination. Even so, the committee could still send it to the full Senate, where Tillerson’s chances would be tenuous.

Pressed on Trump’s calls for a national registry of Muslims, Tillerson said he “would need to have a lot more information around how such an approach would even be constructed.”

On issue after issue — the dangers of letting Japan and South Korea obtain nuclear weapons, his opposition to a ban on Muslim immigration, the need to push back hard against Putin’s efforts to expand Russian influence — Tillerson showed considerable independence from Trump, separating himself from many of the president-elect’s campaign pronouncements. While Trump described an America that would defend allies only if they paid their fair share, Tillerson repeatedly emphasised fulfilling alliance commitments.

Tillerson came to the hearing acutely aware that his first task was to allay concerns that his four decades at Exxon had left him too close to Putin and dictators around the world. So he staked out his turf early in the hearing, arguing that if he had been in office when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, he would have recommended that the United States provide arms and intelligence support to the government of Ukraine, even though it is not a member of Nato.

“What the Russian leadership would have understood is a powerful response,” he said, casting the Obama administration’s reaction as too weak. His message to the Russian leadership, he said, would be, “Yes, you took Crimea, but this stops right here.”

But Tillerson dodged a series of questions about whether Exxon Mobil, under his leadership, had lobbied against the sanctions imposed on Russia, which prevented the company from fulfilling huge contracts for oil exploration on Russian territory.

On climate change, Tillerson said he did not view it as the imminent national security threat that some others did. Although he surprised many in the oil business by acknowledging the dangers of global warming and even embracing carbon taxes, as he did again Wednesday, he said that much of the literature on the issue remained “inconclusive,” despite the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community about the role of humans.

Tillerson showed a deep familiarity with many of the most contentious issues in US foreign policy, including the rules governing transactions with the Cuban government and the outlines of the Iran nuclear deal. It was on Iran that he tried to strike a middle ground between Republicans who said the deal should be scrapped — including Vice President-elect Mike Pence — and those who simply call for tougher enforcement of its provisions.

He promised a “comprehensive review” that would include confidential side-agreements, largely between Iran and international nuclear inspectors, that have long been a subject of Republican suspicions. But his real complaint about the 2015 accord is that its key restrictions on Iran expire in 2030, and he said he feared Iran would “go back to where they were,” trying to build a nuclear weapon.

Some of the day’s most fascinating moments came as Tillerson tried to weave a fairly conventional, hard-power view of US influence into a tapestry that clearly rejected some of Trump’s views. Although the president-elect has said that he doubted the usefulness of the US-led sanctions against Russia for its incursion into Ukraine, Tillerson took the opposite view. He said he looked forward to working with the Senate “particularly on the construct of new sanctions” against Moscow in an effort “to cause modifications in Russia’s positions.”

At the same time, in a tense series of exchanges, Tillerson said he could not say whether Exxon had lobbied against Russia sanctions after the annexation of Crimea, even though the company had submitted filings saying that it was lobbying on the topic. “Let’s be clear,” the company said on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon. “We engage with lawmakers to discuss sanction impacts, not whether or not sanctions should be imposed.”

There were other attempts to separate from positions Trump took last year. Tillerson indicated that President Bashar Assad of Syria would ultimately have to leave power — the Obama administration’s position — and assailed Assad’s bombing of civilians. Trump had talked about allying with Assad and Russia to fight the Islamic State, even while acknowledging the Syrian leader is “a bad guy.”

source : gulfnews