The president has had enough of being challenged over foreign policy

ON THE eve of a high-stakes trip to Asia in November 2017, President Donald Trump was asked by a Fox News anchor whether the State Department might be thwarting his America First agenda. Do you need more Trump nominees to push your vision through, the anchor asked? She was referring to scores of political positions that then remained (and still remain) unfilled at American diplomatic posts and agencies worldwide. Her question reflected a conventional Republican gripe, namely that the State Department is a cooing dovecote, full of apologists for Abroad. Mr Trump offered an unconventional answer. Lots of posts never need to be filled, he replied: “I’m the only one that matters, because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be.”

Mr Trump meant what he said, as he showed on March 13th after publicly sacking his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, in a tweet. His new chief diplomat will be Mike Pompeo, a hardline partisan and former member of Congress who as director of the CIA for the past year has become one of Mr Trump’s favourite aides and loyal defenders (see Lexington). Offering his highest praise for an underling, Mr Trump told reporters that when he is with Mr Pompeo, “We’re always on the same wavelength.” That, he added as he headed to southern California to inspect border-wall prototypes, is “what I need as secretary of state.”

Nor is the president done. Signalling the “Trump Unbound” stage of his presidency, he announced: “We’re getting very close to having the cabinet and other things that I want.” A senior Republican senator, John Barrasso, draws on the cowboy heritage of his home state, Wyoming, to describe what is coming next. “A year into it, the President is taking the reins of the stagecoach,” he says. Mr Barrasso recommends study of Mr Trump’s campaign priorities—border security, trade fights and tax cuts—to know what is coming. As for the new team that Mr Trump is assembling, he advises: “The president certainly values loyalty.”

Foreign diplomats are braced for the possible sacking of the National Security Adviser, Lt. General H.R. McMaster, who rubs Mr Trump up the wrong way. They would not be astonished to see the axe fall on the White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, a former four-star general who has sought to bring order to Trump-world, irritating his boss. Sober sorts in the White House insist that John Bolton, a ferocious warhawk, is not really on track to become National Security Adviser, despite reports that he has been interviewed for the post. But “I’ll believe it when I don’t see it,” says an unhappy source.

Mr Trump spelled out specific policy areas in which he disagreed with Mr Tillerson, starting with the deal forged by Barack Obama with other world powers to freeze Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). “I wanted to either break it or do something. And he felt a little bit differently,” Mr Trump sniffed. That nodded to a decision that the president must by law make every few months to endorse the pact or walk away from it.

That is a hard call because Iran is in technical compliance with the deal, even though Mr Trump thinks it a “terrible” agreement that fails to rein in Iran’s missile programmes and broader troublemaking in the Middle East, and, worse, is time-limited by a series of “sunset clauses”. The next deadline falls in May. Mr Tillerson was a prominent voice, along with the Defence Secretary James Mattis, for heeding the warnings of allies such as Britain, France and Germany that they cannot and will not rewrite the Iran deal. Mr Pompeo is an Iran hawk, and the JCPOA’s existence “hangs by a thread,” says an insider. Allied governments have sought to placate Mr Trump with offers of a side declaration, in which JCPOA signatories say they do not intend to let Iran resume nuclear work. Mr Trump has signalled scorn for this solution, without saying what would satisfy him. Should America quit the JCPOA, expect European governments to say it is not dead. But it could die, as European companies choose between Iran’s markets and risking American sanctions.

In one sense Mr Pompeo’s elevation is a relief. Even in tranquil times the world needs a chief diplomat who speaks with authority for America’s president. These are not tranquil times and Mr Tillerson, a gravel-voiced former CEO of ExxonMobil, has been a dreadful secretary of state, humiliated for months, most recently when Mr Trump decided to meet the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, without consulting him (see article). A Texas oilman and former president of the Boy Scouts of America, Mr Tillerson rose to the top of a business that thinks long-term, signing contracts intended to last decades with governments both benign and horrid, far from the public gaze. That made him enough of an establishment man to alienate Mr Trump, who thinks promises are for losers. Mr Tillerson was also too much the aloof, secretive CEO to earn the trust of his clever, thin-skinned department.

Yet the world should fear Trump unbound. Mr Trump’s true agenda is less a collection of policies and ideological positions on right or left than it is a story about America, drawn from his own deepest beliefs. It is a populist story about betrayal. Talk to members of the president’s inner circle and listen to Mr Trump’s speeches, and a potent narrative of grievance unfolds. In this telling America emerged from the second world war as an unrivalled superpower, and magnanimously crafted, funded and defended a rules-based order that allowed other countries to rise. In time, though, those others took advantage of their generous patron, with the help of weak and foolish American elites. This humiliation has enraged Mr Trump since the 1980s. To this day his complaints have a retro feel. Witnesses report Oval Office tirades that return again and again to the threat from German cars or Japanese steel.

That is the story that Mr Trump yearns to rewrite, while there is still time and America retains the strength to punch back. Mr Trump likes trade tariffs, and wants to impose massive ones on China before long, dwarfing his recent imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminium. The resignation of Gary Cohn, his chief economic adviser and a conventional free-trader, removes a check on Mr Trump’s instincts.

The State Department is unsure where this new era of monarchical government leaves them. Mr Tillerson achieved the unhappy feat of alienating the White House by heeding the policy advice written for him by career diplomats, taking conventional State Department lines on issues from climate change to the Iran deal, while alienating those same diplomats by seeming to disdain them. Disastrously for morale, he declined to defend his own department when the White House proposed cutting its budget by 25% or more—though as diplomats like to note, there are more troops employed in American military bands than there are Foreign Service Officers serving overseas. Mr Tillerson squandered goodwill with a corporate restructuring that felt to many staff like an invitation to resign. At one point, outside consultants sent round a questionnaire asking: “To optimally support the future mission of the Department, what one or two things should your work unit totally stop doing or providing?”

Experienced envoys have retired or resigned in droves. John Feeley resigned as ambassador to Panama on March 9th. He is no squishy hand-wringer. A former Marine helicopter pilot, he oversaw cartel-busting operations as deputy chief of mission in Mexico. He wishes Mr Pompeo well but fears: “The fundamental problem is that the president thinks he can frame and execute a one-man foreign policy.” Mr Feeley resigned in protest at what he calls Mr Trump’s warping of American values underpinning a rules-based order, such as democracy and free trade. America will struggle to replace such envoys. Mr Trump could not care less. Others should.