Rex Tillerson, oil tycoon, is exactly the man you expected him to be

The New York Times has a good look at Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump’s nominee for  secretary of state, and his rather rapid shift of opinion on whether Russia was a place with "no respect for the rule of law" or whether Vladimir Putin was a super-awesome business buddy once you discounted all those murdered journalists and civil rights crackdowns.

Hey, it turns out you can make a man believe whatever you want as long as you line his pockets well.

[A]s Mr. Putin consolidated his control over Russia’s oligarchs, Mr. Tillerson underwent a profound change of outlook. He came to realize that the key to success in Russia, a country deeply important to Exxon’s future, lay in establishing personal relationships with Mr. Putin and his friend and confidant, Igor Sechin, the powerful head of Rosneft, the state oil company.

And as Mr. Tillerson and other oil executives pivoted from the private sector to the state oil company, the criticism that they had directed toward the Kremlin dried up. The payoff for Exxon was immense: a $500 billion joint venture in 2011 to drill for oil on the Arctic shelf and the Black Sea and another huge deal to develop shale oil deposits in Siberia.

Perhaps the most depressing part of the story is how banal it all is. Rex Tillerson had human rights concerns about Russia; Rex Tillerson's company began to court deals in Russia and those concerns evaporated. Rex Tillerson was once wary over the Russian government's propensity to change laws out from under companies that have lost Kremlin favor; he therefore now works with the state's own oil firm and curries favor with the Kremlin wherever possible. After the United States sanctioned Russia for seizing Ukrainian territory, Tillerson ignored those sanctions and continued to cultivate his relationship with his Russian hosts, appearing last June at the top Russian business forum despite those sanctions.

There is no deeper there there, apparently; Rex Tillerson is exactly the man you would expect a man who rose to the top of the oil industry to be. He has no evident morals or concerns about the world that supersede a paycheck. His respect for his own nation ends when there is a business deal to be made somewhere else.