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His warning came Friday during his brief visit to Paris, France, where he commented on Riyadh’s behavior toward Yemen, Qatar and other neighbors.

“With respect to Saudi Arabia’s engagement with Qatar, how they’re handling the Yemen war that they’re engaged in, the Lebanon situation, we would encourage them to be a bit more measured and a bit more thoughtful in those actions to, I think, fully consider the consequences,” Tillerson said.

In Yemen, Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a bloody military campaign early in 2015 and have, ever since, been ceaselessly pounding the country in an attempt to reinstall a former regime allied to Riyadh.

The Saudi-led coalition has also maintained an embargo on the country where, so far, over 12,000 civilians have been reportedly killed.

Riyadh tightened that embargo after a retaliatory missile attack from Yemen early in November. The Saudi regime has claimed that it has partially loosened that embargo in the face of massive international outcry.

The remarks by Tillerson come even as the US has itself been contributing to the Saudi-led war on Yemen both directly, through intelligence sharing and logistical support, and indirectly, with the sale of billions of dollars’ worth of arms to the Saudi regime.

Earlier in May, Tillerson’s boss, US President Donald Trump, signed a 350-billion-dollar arms deal with Riyadh.

Publicly, however, and as the Saudi-led atrocities in Yemen draw more attention, the US has been calling for Saudi restraint.

Earlier this week, Trump directed aides to urge Saudi leaders to immediately end the kingdom’s blockade on Yemen, a demand Tillerson renewed Friday by calling for its “complete end.”

The White House also issued a statement on the same day, urging the Saudis to facilitate the free flow of humanitarian aid to all of Yemen’s ports and through the Sana’a airport.

In addition, a senior Trump administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, “We wanted to be very clear with Saudi officials that the political environment here could constrain us if steps aren’t taken to ease humanitarian conditions in Yemen.”

In Qatar, Saudi Arabia has led the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt and other neighbors in enforcing a blockade of the tiny nation on allegations that Doha supports terrorism and is too close to Iran. Qatar has vehemently rejected the claims.

In Lebanon, Saudi Arabia is widely believed to have coerced Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri (pictured below) into stepping down and put him under house arrest.

On November 4, Hariri stunned Lebanon and the region by announcing his resignation in a live television broadcast from Saudi Arabia. He accused Iran and Hezbollah of sowing strife in the Arab world, an allegation rejected by both sides.

However, he returned to Lebanon on November 22 and eventually rescinded his resignation on December 5 following a deal reached with rival political parties at the end of the first cabinet meeting.

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Miller was pushed into retirement after being granted a five-minute meeting with Tillerson, who had earlier turned down his “repeated and sometimes urgent requests from the department’s security staff to brief him” during the secretary’s first nine months in office, The New York Times reported Saturday citing several former top officials in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

Miller – who served as the acting assistant secretary for diplomatic security – joined a procession of dismissals and early retirements that has “decimated the State Department’s senior ranks,” prompting off-the-record ire as well as congressional concerns about the persisting trend.

This is while US Republican lawmakers denounced former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for what they viewed as her inadequate attention to security in the months before the deadly 2012 attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

In a letter to Tillerson last week, Democratic members of the House Foreign Relations Committee expressed concern about “what appears to be the intentional hollowing-out of our senior diplomatic ranks,” citing what they described as “the exodus of more than 100 senior Foreign Service officers from the State Department since January.”

Moreover, Republican Senators John McCain of Arizona and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire sent a similar letter to the top US diplomat telling him that “America’s diplomatic power is being weakened internally as complex global crises are growing externally.”

Tillerson, however, has made no secret of his idea that the State Department “is a bloated bureaucracy and that he regards much of the day-to-day diplomacy that lower-level officials conduct as unproductive,” according to the report.

Even before the former chief executive of oil giant Exxon Mobile was confirmed, his staff fired six of the department’s top career diplomats, including former under-secretary of state for management, Patrick Kennedy. Kristie Kenney, the department’s counselor and one of just five career ambassadors, was also summarily fired a few weeks later.

None were given any reason for their dismissals, although Kennedy and Kenney had been reprimanded by Trump transition authorities for answering basic logistical questions by Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations.

Tillerson is widely believed to dislike Haley, who is regarded as a potential successor if he quits or is sacked by US President Donald Trump as anticipated in a number of press reports.

The top US diplomat launched a reorganization that he has said will be the most important thing he will do, vowing to slash the state department’s budget by 31 percent and hiring two consulting companies to lead the effort. He has further frozen most hiring and recently offered a $25,000 buyout in hopes of pushing nearly 2,000 career diplomats and civil servants to leave by October 2018.

His small team of aides “have fired some diplomats and gotten others to resign by refusing them the assignments they wanted or taking away their duties altogether.” Among those sacked or sidelined were “most of the top African-American and Latino diplomats, as well as many women.”

This is while the political appointees who typically join the department after a change in administration have not made up for those departures. So far just 10 of the top 44 political positions in the state department have been filled, and for most of the vacancies, Tillerson has not nominated anyone.

One outcome may be that there is no one in place with responsibilities for some key trouble spots, such the Korean Peninsula. Although the North Korean nuclear crisis is Washington’s top priority, the Trump administration has yet to nominate an assistant secretary for East Asia or an ambassador to South Korea.

Furthermore, amid growing fears of emerging conflicts in the Middle East with persisting Saudi war on neighboring Yemen and the kingdom’s provocations against Lebanon and Iran, there is no confirmed US assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs or ambassadors to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt or Qatar.

The department is also lacking a confirmed assistant secretary for African affairs or an ambassador to South Africa as Zimbabwe faces a future following the departure of long-time President Robert Mugabe.

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The Iranian Foreign Ministry has rejected reports that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had notified his Iranian counterpart of Washington’s new strategy on Tehran.

“What Mr. Tillerson says goes back to his speech during the ministerial meeting of the P5+1 (permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Apart from that, there have been no other meeting and talks between the foreign ministers of Iran and the US,” Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi said on Friday.

Earlier in the day, Reuters cited Tillerson as saying that during the September meeting at the UN, he had discussed with Zarif the possibility of negotiating a new agreement that would address Iran’s missile program and the nuclear deal’s “sunset clause,” which will put an end to restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program after a few years.

“I indicated this to Foreign Minister Zarif when we saw each other on the margins of the UN. I do not want to suggest to you that we give that a high chance of success, but there is an openness to talk about it,” Tillerson said.

US President Donald Trump officially announced on Friday that he would not certify Iran’s nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with the US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China.

Apart from his refusal to certify the JCPOA, Trump also warned in his strategic review of US policy on Iran that he might ultimately terminate the deal, in defiance of other world powers and undermining a landmark victory of multilateral diplomacy.

While Trump did not pull Washington out of the nuclear deal, he gave the US Congress 60 days to decide whether to reimpose economic sanctions against Tehran that were lifted under the pact. Reimposing sanctions would put the US at odds with other signatories to the accord and the European Union.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani slammed Trump’s speech against the Islamic Republic as nothing more than insults and delirious talk, urging the US president to brush up on his world history and geography to improve his comprehension of international obligations and global ethics, etiquette and conventions.

The Iranian president further rejected Trump’s demand that the 2015 nuclear deal be revised, saying the agreement would remain intact and no article or paragraph would be added or taken away from it.

The Western allies of the US, including the EU and the leaders of France, Britain and Germany as well as Russia criticized Trump’s speech and reaffirmed their commitment to the JCPOA.

The US president also accused the Iranian authorities of not allowing nuclear inspectors to have full access to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear sites.

Shortly after Trump’s speech, IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano refuted the US president’s claim, saying, “So far, the IAEA has had access to all locations it needed to visit.”

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