PRESIDENT President Trump’s firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was surprising in both its timing and its manner. Though there were tensions between the two men, last Christmas it seemed Tillerson had reached a working balance with the President. The timing therefore caught State Department officials on the hop because Tillerson was on his way back from a weeklong tour of six African states.

Moreover the manner of Tillerson’s ouster was extraordinary, though not perhaps for this most unusual of Oval Office occupants. Trump used Twitter to announce CIA Director Mike Pompeo would be the new Secretary of State, adding a curt thanks to Tillerson for his work. Since Tillerson does not do Twitter, he did not know what had happened until aides brought him the news. It might be a regarded as stunning bad manners that Trump did not put in a call to Tillerson on his flight back from Africa before making the public announcement.

One commentator has likened what has happened to Tillerson to the 1890 overthrow of the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck by imperial Germany’s new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, an event characterized in a celebrated cartoon entitled “Dropping the Pilot”. By the adroit use of diplomacy and military power, Bismarck had seen the unification of Germany under Prussia, the military defeat of Austria, France and Denmark and the rapid growth of its industrial strength.

Wilhelm II, who 14 year later began the World War I, and Trump do seem to share certain qualities, including petulance and a strong narcissistic streak. But there is however no comparison between Bismarck and Tillerson. The American may have been a widely respected head of oil giant Exxon but he was no statesman and almost made a virtue that he was far from being a Washington insider. In this respect he fitted the Trump administration pattern, dominated as it always has been by personalities from outside the “Washington swamp” which Trump pledged to drain.

But the initial promise of the relationship broke down. Tillerson was reportedly amazed at what he considered his president’s slight grasp of foreign affairs and he never entirely denied that in a meeting with aides, he had once called Trump “a moron”.

One of the key points on which the two men disagreed was Iran. Trump always saw Obama’s nuclear deal with Tehran as a major US foreign policy failure. He has shared the Saudi view that the long and tortuous negotiations in Vienna and Geneva were an Iranian diplomatic masterclass which conned the international community into lifting sanctions in return for time-limited commitments that it never intended to honor anyway.

Over Iran, Tillerson’s successor, Mike Pompeo is very much on the same page as Trump. Tehran now knows that Washington’s policy towards it has some serious steel in its backbone. The President wants to tear up the nuclear deal and re-impose international sanctions. If the ayatollahs resume their diplomatic game of bluff and double bluff, they risk incurring the same Trump wrath that has brought their nuclear technology friend, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un to the very edge of the negotiating table.

It must be hoped Trump and Pompeo’s new tough line with Iran will not simply focus on its nuclear weapons program but will also aim to end the ayatollah’s malign and bloody interference in the affairs of its Arab neighbors.