This has happened before. For nearly five years, Richard Nixon kept his old friend Bill Rogers as his nominal secretary of state, while the real diplomatic clout was wielded by Henry Kissinger, the national-security adviser. It was Kissinger who arranged Nixon’s historic visit to China, successfully pursued nuclear-arms-reduction talks with the Soviet Union, and led negotiations with Hanoi to end the Vietnam War. Cynics dubbed Rogers the “secretary of the links” because of all the time he had to play golf. “You could walk through Rogers’ deepest influence on foreign policy and not get your ankles wet,” cracked the late Nixon speechwriter and columnist William Safire.

No one is suggesting that Tillerson, the type-A former CEO of ExxonMobil, will allow himself to be satisfied with a golf cart. But he certainly appears not to have a front-row seat on many foreign-policy issues. He was absent at President Trump’s meetings with the leaders of Israel, Canada, and Japan, and he wasn’t consulted on Trump’s botched executive order restricting non-citizen entry to the U.S. The White House overruled his pick of Elliott Abrams as the No. 2 man at State after Trump was made aware that Abrams had publicly criticized him during the 2016 campaign.

To date, Tillerson is Trump’s only political appointee at the State Department; two dozen other such posts remain unfilled, and the vacuum could have serious consequences. “The longer Tillerson is ‘home alone’ at State, the more he relies on Obama holdovers who don’t have the administration’s best interests at heart,” one former State Department official told me. “The more that happens, the less willing the White House is to give Tillerson the staff he wants.”