One might think that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would be concerned with supporting the battered international image of the United States after his boss encouraged a crowd that invaded the Capitol in an attempt to reverse the result of the last election, leaving five dead.
But the top US foreign policy official has more pressing matters to deal with. In addition to polishing his reputation with a flurry of more than 200 self-congratulatory tweets, he is spending his last days in office throwing diplomatic banana peels in the path of his successors, formally but very spurious, designating foreign actors he does not like terrorists.
Unfortunately, Pompeo’s efforts to impose it on the Biden government will impose severe and totally unnecessary costs on millions of civilians. Although ultimately reversible, policies will inflict collateral damage on innocent people as the months-long review process to terminate them is completed
Pompeo started on Sunday by designating the Houthis, a rebel group that controls much of Yemen, as a “foreign terrorist organization”. On Monday, he did the same by designating Cuba as a sponsor state for terrorism.
The most obviously outrageous of Pompeo’s movements is that against Cuba. Yes, the country systematically represses political dissent and has a poor human rights record, and is allied with countries that have poor relations with Washington, especially Venezuela. But this is simply not the same as sponsoring terrorism.
The technicality on which Pompeo relies on the charge of terrorism is particularly laughable. In 2018, Cuba agreed to a request by the Colombian government to provide safe haven and passage for leaders of the ELN, a Marxist guerrilla group in Colombia designated by the U.S. and others as a terrorist organization, so that they could hold peace negotiations with Bogotá. But after the ELN took responsibility for a deadly attack on a police academy in January 2019, a new Colombian government asked Cuba to abandon its promise of safe passage and hand over the ELN leaders to trial, which Havana refused. to do.
Not only does Cuba’s refusal to violate a safe haven guarantee made for peace negotiations go a long way to sponsoring terrorist attacks, but the United States has for years allowed other countries similar leeway – allowing Qatar to offer safe havens to leaders of the Taliban, for example, to conduct peace negotiations with the United States, despite continued attacks on American forces.
Pompeo’s announcement also cites Cuba’s refusal to extradite the violent radicals of the 1970s and renounce its relationship with Venezuela as a justification. But do these complaints really meet the criteria of having “repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism” in any current sense?
The misuse of the term terrorism is generally understood as a political handout for the Cuban-American hardliners who spurred President Donald Trump’s victory in Florida in November. But the designation of terrorism will mainly damage Cuba’s tourism-oriented economy, hindering economic relations with other countries that may now conflict with US law to deal with Cuba. This will succeed in hurting ordinary Cubans, but not in controlling the regime in power.
Pompeo’s decision the day before designating Yemen’s Houthi rebels as a foreign terrorist organization is superficially more defensible – but in fact more fundamentally flawed, as it threatens more serious consequences than Cuba’s policy.
The Houthi rebels, who rule most of Yemen’s population centers, including the capital Sanaa, are undeniably a violent group. They took control of much of the country in 2015 and are now at war with Saudi forces and Yemeni factions seeking to restore the former government and receive a moderate degree of material support from Iran in their military endeavors.
In this context of war, the Houthis launched attacks on targets in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (which mostly came out of the conflict in 2019). However, they have not launched any significant attack against the United States or its ally Israel.
The definition of a foreign terrorist organization specifies that the country or group must have carried out or intends to carry out politically motivated attacks against non-combatants that specifically threaten the interests of the United States. While Houthi rocket attacks have indiscriminately killed civilians, the same is true of a much larger scale of Saudi air strikes – which have killed thousands of Yemeni civilians – while they have the support of President Barack Obama and then Trump.
The designation of the terrorist group is undoubtedly meant to be a farewell gift to a country that Trump still sees as a loyal partner, as well as a means of increasing pressure on Iran by designating its increasingly open support for the Houthis as aid to terrorists. – which could help undermine Biden’s already difficult project to revive the nuclear deal with Iran that Trump has closed.
To be sure, the Houthis are guilty of indiscriminate and brutal acts. But by designating a rebel army with purely regional objectives as an international terrorist group, Pompeo is fueling a humanitarian crisis that will affect the more than 16 million Yemeni civilians living in areas controlled by the Houthis.
That’s because the designation of terror makes humanitarian aid groups potentially at fault for providing food and medical assistance to these areas, with possibly devastating consequences for 80% of the Yemeni population that depends on humanitarian aid. Although Pompeo has signaled that the designation’s legal powers will not be used against humanitarian groups, legal protections for aid groups were not created in Pompeo’s haste to implement the terrorism designation.
Pompeo knows that this decision will create a mess that his successor will have to clean up, as two years earlier the Trump administration decided not to apply such a designation precisely because he feared it would prevent aid deliveries.
And it doesn’t matter that decades of United States sanctions on Cuba and years of war in Yemen must have long ago destroyed any illusion that further disapproval against Havana or the Houthis will force them to leave.
The damage from this irresponsible action unfortunately extends beyond Cuba and Yemen. Pompeo’s blatant misuse of the term “terrorism” also weakens the application of the term to states and groups that indisputably carry out terrorist activities. After all, the presumed moral authority that runs the list, and adherence to it by foreign companies, can evaporate if its powers are used frivolously against states and armed groups that do not fit the bill.
Fortunately, the Biden government can – and in both cases almost certainly will – reverse Pompeo’s last-minute designations. However, this will require a lengthy and contentious review process that will consume tax dollars and political capital unnecessarily.
This suits Pompeo and Trump perfectly, of course, as it will create new opportunities to outrage Biden and disrupt the work on his foreign policy agenda. But that does not make these acts of “diplomatic hooliganism” against US foreign policy less deliberate or childish.