Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s last trip abroad as a top US diplomat was canceled, the State Department announced on Tuesday, citing the need for him to stay in Washington to prepare for the transition to the Biden government.
Pompeo was due to travel to Brussels on Wednesday for meetings with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Belgium’s Foreign Minister Sophie Wilmès, but the State Department canceled “all planned trips this week”.
The secretary’s brief trip to Europe was supposed to initially include a stop in Luxembourg, but officials in the small NATO country canceled the visit after the pro-Trump rebellion on the United States Capitol last week, according to three sources aware of the decision.
In an interview with the local RFL vehicle on Thursday, Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn called President Donald Trump “a criminal” and “a political pyromaniac who must be brought to the criminal court”. A spokesman for the Luxembourg government declined to comment.
The State Department’s public announcement of the trip, released 24 hours before its withdrawal, listed Belgium as Pompeo’s only destination.
The trip to Belgium by the United States’ top diplomat would traditionally involve meeting with EU leaders, as is often the case with Pompeo. But no meeting with EU officials was planned even before Wednesday’s events, according to two European and two American officials familiar with planning the trip.
America’s allies joined in their dismay at the violent scenes at the center of American democracy, with some world leaders explicitly blaming Trump for inciting his supporters to invade the building. Both Stoltenberg and Wilmès described Wednesday’s violent attack on the Capitol as “shocking” and reiterated the legitimacy of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
But the secretary’s meetings in Brussels were still taking place on Tuesday morning, the sources said, with some State Department officials already in place.
On Tuesday afternoon, Pompeo called Stoltenberg to inform him that he would no longer travel, a NATO official confirmed to NBC News. The official who was not on the call said the secretary reported that the cancellation was due to the necessary arrangements around the transition.
A trip to Taiwan by the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Kelly Craft, was also canceled as part of the cancellation of all trips by the State Department this week.
Craft was reportedly the first member of the Trump administration to meet with Taiwanese officials after Pompeo removed all restrictions on U.S.-Taiwan relations last weekend. This move was strongly condemned by China, which sees Taiwan as a renegade province that it should control.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian warned Pompeo at the time to “stop going the wrong and dangerous way” or he would be “severely punished by history”.
Abigail Williams and Josh Lederman reported from Washington, DC, and Carlo Angerer reported from Munich.
