The Donald Trump administration this week nominated Marshall Billingslea, the former Treasury Department antiterrorism official nominally in charge of nuclear arms control negotiations, as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
Billingslea, as special presidential envoy for arms control, is already the point person for the White House’s more-or-nothing attempt to secure a trilateral nuclear arms control deal covering the United States, Russia, and China. Such an accord, if the White House has its way, would replace the New START pact between Washington and Moscow.
China has said it will not negotiate such an agreement. Meanwhile, New START will expire next February absent an extension of up to five years from Russia and the United States.
The White House created Billingslea’s current position for him, after the Senate twice failed to confirm his appointment to a different post at the State Department in 2018 and 2019. That gave Billingslea a way into the agency after Democrats began to coalesce against him, citing his involvement, as a Department of Defense staffer in the Geroge W. Bush administration, with the use of interrogation techniques later deemed torture on terrorism detainees at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. In a Senate report from 2008, Billingslea encouraged such techniques.
If confirmed this time by the Senate — which during the COVID-19 pandemic is still moving judicial nominees, and this week even held hearings for a few Pentagon nominees — Billingslea would assume full time the job now performed on an acting basis by Christopher Ford, assistant secretary for international security and nonproliferation. He would formally succeed Andrea Thompson, who left the State Department in October 2019. This particular undersecretary is State’s day-to-day point person on international arms control negotiations and compliance.
The White House nominated Billingslea for his new job on Monday. Billingslea last got through the Senate in June 2017, when lawmakers voted 65-35 to confirm him as Treasury’s assistant secretary for terrorist financing. That year, 12 Democrats crossed the aisle to join every Senate Republican in voting “aye.”
Since then, Democrats, with Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) as de facto spokesperson, have even more strenuously objected to promoting Billingslea.
“Mr. Billinsglea has a troubled history with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” Menendez wrote in a statement last month, when the White House installed Billingslea at Foggy Bottom as the arms control envoy. “Following his unsuccessful nomination for the State Department’s top human rights post, serious questions remain concerning whether he was forthright and truthful when testifying before the committee about his role in the detainee torture scandal during the Bush administration.”
There, Menendez referenced Billingslea’s nominations in 2018 and 2019 to be undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy, and human rights. Billingslea got a hearing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2019, but no vote on the floor of the upper chamber. His nomination went back to the White House on procedural grounds earlier this year, one of many to suffer that fate every two years.
“This is not who should be put in charge of our nuclear diplomacy,” Menendez wrote in his statement last month.
Ford, a rhetorical bomb thrower who has become a public foil to the nongovernmental arms-control community in political exile, welcomed his potential replacement to State last month with courteous words on Twitter.
“I’m looking forward to working again with my old friend Marshall Billingslea, the new Special Envoy for Arms Control, as we advance the President’s agenda of trilateral arms control to address the Chinese and Russian nuclear buildups,” Ford wrote.
