Trump's advisers learn to read boss

WASHINGTON -- Rex Tillerson's mission was delicate but not unfamiliar as he phoned President Donald Trump last week: Persuade the boss to curb his own impulses on yet another potentially explosive national security issue.

Trump had stormed into the new year threatening on Twitter to cut off aid to the Palestinians after little Mideast peace progress. His U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, egged Trump on, pushing him to suspend all of a planned $125 million payment to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. Tillerson's State Department and the Pentagon sought to preserve the full amount, fearful about the implications for millions of people and U.S. partner governments in the Middle East.

In a phone call this past Friday, the secretary of state sold the president on a compromise: Give half the money, put the rest on hold. It would allow Trump to say he followed through on a threat, without further destabilizing the Arab world.

For Tillerson, it was a strategy derived by trial and error over a tumultuous first year under a president whose instinct to rip up the traditional playbook continues to shock the foreign policy establishment. It's fallen to Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster to soften some of Trump's most dramatic impulses, all while dealing with competing power centers and messy internal arguments spilling into the open.

"This president's different, and so everybody had to understand that this is going to be different," Tillerson said in a recent Associated Press interview. He said foreign leaders, too, have adjusted to Trump's unconventional style. "Now that we're a year into it, I think most of them have become rather accustomed to it."

Trump entered office vowing to pursue an unpredictable foreign policy. He hasn't disappointed. Through unorthodox and often undiplomatic comments and approaches to everything from the NATO alliance to nuclear weapons, he repeatedly has sent his closest advisers scrambling to defuse tensions, avert potential conflict and contain damage.

Sometimes the damage spans continents, as with Trump's recent slurs against African nations and Haiti. Just as frequently, the tensions erupt within.

His national security team has been beset by rivalries: between former White House strategist Steve Bannon and Trump son-in-law/Mideast peace negotiator Jared Kushner; between Bannon and McMaster; Bannon and Tillerson; Tillerson and Kushner; Tillerson and McMaster; and Tillerson and U.N. envoy Haley.

One fundament of stability has been Tillerson's alliance with Mattis.

"They never go to a national security council meeting or to the president without being in agreement in advance themselves," Sen. Bob Corker, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, said in an interview. "So they're always on the same page."

Working in tandem, Tillerson and Mattis have tried to form the tempering force, quietly guiding the president toward more conventional decisions.

Many such matters originated in Trump campaign promises and tweets, apparently intended to rev up his base. Critics fear such political considerations have dangerously superseded delicate questions of diplomacy and informed policy-making needed to protect the United States.

"President Trump has spent the last year trying to upend the very international system the United States built after World War II to create a world safe for Americans, our interests and our allies," said Sen. Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Publicly, at least, Trump's aides take his impulsiveness in stride. Tillerson told an audience at Stanford University this week since he doesn't track Trump's tweets in real time, his staff prints them out for him to read later, once world reaction has started pouring in. He said he considers the tweets "information" he then uses to advance the Trump administration's pre-existing objectives.

After all, no one doubts whose show this really is.

"If people don't remember who the 69th secretary of state was 20 years from now," Tillerson said in the AP interview, "it's not going to bother me one bit."