Paul Little: Rex and the city

United States Secretary of State Rex Tillerson battles the winds of Wellington.

Exxon oil, Donald Trump ... Rex Tillerson, former chairman and CEO of the former and Secretary of State under the latter, sure seems to have a thing about working with tarnished brands.

Admittedly he wasn't boss of Exxon Mobil when its carrier the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into the waters of Alaska. But he was there leading the charge when the Supreme Court was persuaded to cut punitive damages against the company from the $5 billion originally awarded to $500 million.

I have a friend who works in PR and has some principles. Near the top is to always tell the truth and acknowledge mistakes while finding the positives. If Satan were her client she would probably admit that, yes, he sometimes gets a bit carried away, but he's very punctual and knows all his employees by name.

There will always be someone around to defend the indefensible. But Rex Tillerson's job has to be more difficult than most.

He had to hit the road for an international glad-handing tour just days after his boss drenched himself in yet more odium and dragged his country even deeper into the pit of international scorn by becoming one of only three nations not to be a party to the Paris agreement on climate change.

The other two are Venezuela and Syria - who didn't sign because they didn't think the accord was strong enough.

Secretary of State used to be quite the flash gig. Even unprincipled war-whores like Henry Kissinger and, well, most of them, got a bit of respect as they trotted around the globe reminding everyone that America was the boss, if only thanks to some glory reflected from their president.

Not much chance of that when you have to go out and front for a babbling man-child who makes the average reality TV contestant look stable. What can it be like having to make your mouth say plausible words out loud while your brain is wondering what your boss will have farted out in a tweet that directly contradicts them by the time you get back to your room?

Politics is to a large extent about the art of compromise, and few politicians have ever been more compromised than those surrounding the president of the United States. Tillerson is no exception.

In his time at Exxon he expressed support for a carbon tax and the company endorsed the Paris agreement.

Now he is twisting the truth to order. He backed Trump's decision to pull out by saying his actions reflected "the will of the American people".

Fake news, I'm afraid. According to a Washington Post and ABC poll, some 60 per cent of American voters opposed the move.

As for why Tillerson was here, it was "to reaffirm to everyone that the United States views this region of the world as being extremely important to both our national security interest and our own economic and prosperity interests".

So it's all about them, then. Anything else we can do to help, just let us know.
And yet - there were those protesters.

"I've never seen so many people flip the bird at an American motorcade as I saw today," said one US journalist accompanying Tillerson. What's notable about that is that he obviously has enough data to reach the conclusion.

Actually it was a paltry turnout. A tatterdemalion assemblage of a few windswept Wellingtonians and the usual failed Cirque du Soleil performers from Greenpeace shimmied up a crane to unveil a protest banner.

Even they looked dignified compared to the local politicians on the jaunt. There was a powhiri, lots of photo ops; everything to make Tillerson, a long-time associate of Vladimir Putin, feel at home, with the possible exception of vodka shots and Cossack dancing.
Sad.