No doubt that firing The U.S. Secretary of State “Mr. Rex Tillerson” was intended by the U.S. President “Mr. Donald Trump” few months ago for several reasons. A common reason said by some analysts, that it’s when Tillerson insulted Trump describing him with a very rude word “F… Moron”. Actually I disagree with this reason, I think that Tillerson has announced his insult to Trump when he was sure that Trump decided to get rid of him. Therefore, I think that the true reason of Trump’s decision was the permanent disagreement between both of them on critical issues such as Iran, Nuclear agreement, Gulf crisis and North Korea.
Concerning timing of Trump’s decision to firing Tillerson, I see that the timing is related to several issues, a main one of them is announced timing of Trump mediation process between the KSA & UAE and Qatar which is decided to be conducted in Washington within few weeks. You may have noticed that Crown Prince of KSA Mohamed Bin Salman has been already invited to visit Washington on 20th of March.
It is known that Tillerson took a clear contrary positions toward this issue, and I think that several decisions will be taken soon against Iran; bearing in mind that Iran supports Qatar in its position against Gulf states. Of course, Tillerson’s policies do not match KSA and UAE policies in the region, specially the nuclear agreement (Mr. Mike Pompeo the new foreign sate secretary adopts same views of Trump in this issue), in addition to the Gulf crisis and U.S. shrinking influence in Syria.
I believe that U.S. started to be on a direct collision course with Iran in the Middle East, which may lead to a severe storm from EU on Trump.
By: Sayed Ghoneim
Chairman, Institute for Global Security& Defence Affairs (IGSDA)
