The end of Mike Pompeo’s reign in the state department was as controversial and clamorous as the rest of his 32-month term, but it is unclear what traces will remain after he leaves.
Pompeo’s last days were played out in a blizzard of self-congratulatory tweets, at the rate of two dozen a day, as he tried to write his first draft of history.
The former Kansas congressman, with obvious ambitions for a presidential race in 2024, accentuated his claims of success with frequent disparaging references to the previous government, portrayed as unfortunate appeasers.
Some of the tweets were factually incorrect, for example, blaming Barack Obama for an arms control treaty that was signed by Ronald Reagan.
Other claims are contradictory, such as his insistence that the United States has restored deterrence against Iran, alongside its claim that Tehran is a greater threat than ever. On Tuesday, he called Iran “the new Afghanistan”, claiming – without evidence – that it has become the center of operations for Al Qaeda.
Although Iran’s economy has been successfully hit by sanctions, as Pompeo points out, its stockpile of low-enriched uranium is now more than 12 times larger than it was when Pompeo took over as U.S. Secretary of State in 2018.
“If the real economic pressure that U.S. sanctions impose on Tehran has increased or at least failed to stop the activities that the policy should reverse, it is a matter of having an impact without a favorable outcome,” Naysan Rafati, an analyst Iran’s senior at the International Crisis Group said.
Similarly, Pompeo argues that Donald Trump’s encounters with Kim Jong-un have led to a lull in the testing of nuclear warheads and long-range missiles. But he does not mention that Kim declared the end of this moratorium and should now have a substantially larger arsenal than when he started meeting Trump.
Pompeo’s portrait of Trump’s America is in dramatic contrast to recent events. Two days after Congress suffered an unprecedented violent attack by a crowd instigated by Trump, Pompeo cheerfully tweeted: “Being the largest country in the world is not just about our incredible economy and strong armed forces; it’s about the values we project for the world. “
He also boasted that his state department team “did more than any other to build alliances that would guarantee American interests” days before he had to cancel his trip to Europe’s swan song because his colleagues didn’t want to see him .
Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister has signaled that he would not be available to meet with the United States’ top diplomat and described Trump’s behavior as “criminal”. Belgium’s Foreign Minister, Sophie Wilmès, whom Pompeo should also have met on the trip, made it clear on Twitter that his government relied on Joe Biden to restore US unity and stability.
“It is unprecedented for an American Secretary of State to be unwelcome at any time, especially at the end of his term, in the ministries of Foreign Affairs of our closest allies,” Brett Bruen, who was director of Global Engagement at the Obama White House, said. “It just shows how much he was ostracized.”
On his supposed return to victory, Pompeo – known for being fragile – restricted his interviews to the media to admirers of conservative talk show hosts and did not answer questions after his speeches.
On Monday, at the Voice of America (VOA) headquarters, financed by the state, he rebuked journalists for being insufficiently patriotic, even for “demeaning America”. He told them “to spread the word that this is the greatest nation the world has ever known”.
When a VOA journalist, Patsy Widakuswara, tried to ask her questions after her speech, he walked away, ignoring her. Hours later, Widakuswara was relegated from her position as head of the White House to other functions.
Michael Pack, the man installed by Trump and Pompeo at the head of the United States Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA and other federally funded broadcasters, is trying to consolidate his position by making it more difficult for the new government to fire him, making o statutory independence of the agency in your favor. But it is not clear that Pack will succeed, having alienated Democrats and Republicans in Congress with his purges of journalistic and administrative personnel.
“I don’t see the new administration having great difficulty in helping him find a way out,” said Bruen.
There are other ways in which Pompeo has sought to give a final and dramatic tug to the wheel of US foreign policy, with the intention of making it difficult to change the course of the next government.
In the past 10 days, Pompeo has designated Houthi forces in Yemen and Cuba as a terrorist group and a state sponsoring terrorism, respectively, although neither poses a direct threat to the United States.
The Houthi designation, which aid agencies warn that it could cause widespread deaths in Yemen by complicating humanitarian aid deliveries, was made without consulting lawmakers or their staff.
“You fucking need to stop lying to Congress,” an official told a state department official on a conference call informed by Foreign Policy and confirmed to the Guardian by a source familiar with the conversation.
“Like so many similar briefings that we received from this government, they send these poor people to defend these ridiculous policies, and they just can’t,” said a member of the Democratic Congress.
While in the state department, Pompeo spent most of his energy in an attempt to drive nails into the coffin of the nuclear deal between the major world powers made with Iran in 2015, and which Trump withdrew in 2018.
That effort so far has been a failure. In response to waves of U.S. sanctions, Iran has stopped observing some of the agreed restrictions on its nuclear activities, but has signaled that it is ready to negotiate re-entry into the agreement with the new government.
The terrorist sanctions and designations aim to impose political costs on Biden’s team in an attempt to return to the pre-Trump status quo, based on the assumption that it will be unpopular to reward America’s opponents, but it is far from clear whether it will work.
“What he is doing is creating difficult news days for the next government, but it is manageable,” said the senior Democratic official, predicting that the traps Pompeo has set can be removed without spending a lot of political capital. “Many of the damages that Trump and Pompeo caused were through executive actions, so they can be reversed through executive actions.”