Can Trump's Pick for Secretary of State Pass the "Togo Test"?

John Richard Cookson

Politics, Americas

Visiting one African state—or not—can reveal a lot about the diplomatic agenda.

After a wide-ranging selection process, President-elect Donald Trump will reportedly name his secretary of state in the next week or so. As soon as America’s top diplomat is revealed, pundits will undoubtedly pillage through his past, looking for clues that may augur the country’s foreign policy future. There is, however, an even simpler way to determine how the likely sixty-ninth secretary of state will set his agenda: Does he plan to visit Togo or not?

It is an odd question, but one which the sixty-seventh secretary of state answered easily. In January 2012, Secretary Hillary Clinton did visit Togo, the nation of seven million wedged between Ghana and Benin in West Africa. In the capital, Lomé, she toured the modernist, multimillion-dollar, Chinese-built presidential palace with President Faure Gnassingbé. As Clinton pointed out later, “No secretary of state had ever been to Togo before.” In fact, no secretary of state has ever been to as many countries as Clinton, before or since. Her successor, John Kerry, is at the moment a full twenty-one stops short of her total 112.

To reach that record, Clinton had to visit a number of places usually skipped by U.S. secretaries of state. Between 2009 and 2013, her travels took her to the Cook Islands and Timor Leste, to Angola and Cote d'Ivoire, to Uzbekistan and Mongolia, and to Papua New Guinea and Uruguay. She visited Cape Verde a couple of times. Of course, the relevance of these countries to America’s immediate national interest is somewhere between nearly and entirely nonexistent. Nonetheless, there was intention behind this wild itinerary.