Over the weekend Trump’s camp leaked its expected nominee for Secretary of State. Rex Tillerson is Exxon’s CEO. His mentor and predecessor, Lee Raymond, had this to say about Exxon and its relationship with the United States:
“I’m not a U.S. company, and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.”
The context for that quote was that Raymond saw Exxon as an enduring institution that would last beyond any presidency and, probably, even beyond the lifetime of the United States. With that in mind, nation-states do not matter to Exxon – only their global ambitions as applied to the prosperity of the corporation matter. Put another way, the United States is important to Exxon only insomuch as the country adds to or subtracts from its bottom line and long term prospects.
If he is nominated, the first questions Tillerson should be asked at his hearings are:
A) if he believed Exxon’s interests trump those of the United States; and,
B) if he can and will, instantly upon taking office, switch his highest loyalties from Exxon to the United States.
The questions are not academic.
Tillerson was “hand-picked” by Raymond.
LEE RAYMOND, the combative chairman of Exxon Mobil, could be the most successful oilman in a century. During his decade and a half at the helm, his firm—a direct descendant of the original Standard Oil Trust founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1882—has outperformed its peers on almost every financial measure. The oil titan will finally step down at the end of 2005 in favour of Rex Tillerson, a company insider who is his hand-picked successor.
Before assuming the helm at Exxon, Tillerson was responsible for developing business in Russia.
He and Putin go way back. His ExxonMobil biography concludes with this gem: “In 2013, he was awarded the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation.”
[…]
Tillerson rose to the top of ExxonMobil based on his performance running the corporation’s Russia account, often negotiating directly with Putin during the last decade.
In 2011, Tillerson inked what may be the largest oil deal in history at Vladimir Putin’s Sochi palace.
The Arctic well will be among the most expensive Exxon has ever drilled, costing at least $600 million. The spending is justified by the potential prize. Universitetskaya, the geological structure being drilled, is the size of the city of Moscow and large enough to contain more than 9 billion barrels, a trove worth more than $900 billion at today’s prices.
But after Putin annexed Crimea from the Ukraine, the United States imposed sanctions that hit Exxon’s bottom line.
Exxon Mobil said in a 10-k filing with the SEC on Wednesday that it lost a maximum of $1 billion from sanctions. In July 2014, the European Union and United States imposed sanctions on the Russian energy sector. The West believes Russia is behind much of the civil unrest in eastern Ukraine. Sanctions began in March 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula that was once part of Ukraine. But the punishment was kicked up a notch in July with sanctions banning American companies from doing business with Russian oil and gas drillers. That hurt a new $723 million joint venture between Exxon and Rosneft , Russia’s largest state owned oil company. This year, the two companies were to start drilling for oil in the Kara Sea, located in the Arctic Circle in northern Russia.
Those sanctions remain in place, and Tillerson objects.
At the time, Tillerson expressed doubt that sanctions would prove an effective foreign policy tool.
“We don’t find them to be effective unless they are very well implemented,” Tillerson said at the company’s May 2014 shareholders meeting. Authorities imposing the sanctions should consider “who are they really harming?”
Any President is owed deference when it comes to his Cabinet picks. At the same time, the patriotism of our nation’s Secretary of State must be utterly beyond question. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Tillerson meets that standard..