Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo is arguably the most Trumpy of President Trump’s cabinet secretaries. He aggressively pursued the president’s “America First” agenda, imitated the bombast of the commander-in-chief and disregarded the rules observed by his predecessors.
In a sharp shift from former Republicans and Democrats who held office, Pompeo repeated Trump’s praise to dictators and suspicion of traditional democratic allies. The result was a mixed record that, according to foreign policy experts, will take years to assess, but has done little to build ties with foreign leaders delayed by Trump’s contempt for alliances.
Pompeo “looked more like a denier of democracy than a promoter of democracy, more rooted in domestic politics than foreign policy,” said Douglas Alexander of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Future Democracy Project. His mandate “not only weakened the State Department at home,” said Alexander, “but it weakened the United States’ position abroad.
The Secretary of State’s mandate and the adoption of Trump’s impetuous style, say Republican operatives, can best be seen as a calculated way of positioning himself as Trump’s heir in the Republican Party’s 2024 primaries.
Trump’s electoral defeat muddled that calculation, casting doubt on the political future of a cabinet secretary who turned from Trump’s skeptic to obstinate evangelist. To compound Pompeo’s problems, Trump is suggesting that he will run again in 2024, which would likely force legalists who were looking at work like Pompeo to step aside.
If Trump decides not to run in 2024, a Republican candidate will still need to gather the support of a large part of the outgoing president’s base and adopt many of his policies.
But Trump, by supporting the possibility of his own candidacy, freezes the rest of the prospective field.
“They can’t do much until it’s clear whether Trump is going to run,” said Alex Conant, a political consultant who worked on Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign for Florida. “No donor, no party member, no politician from the first states will be able to support anyone. Trump is the 800-pound gorilla, and everyone will continue to make way for him until his plans are known. “
Formed at West Point in Southern California, moved to Kansas and prospered in the defense industry’s business, Pompeo was not always a fan of Trump. Pompeo, then in his third term in Congress, supported Rubio in the 2016 primaries, warning that Trump would be an “authoritarian president who ignored our constitution”. He even ridiculed the business tycoon’s circus campaign.
But after Trump won the nomination, Pompeo quickly dropped his doubts and became a vocal advocate for the future president. He was rewarded with a nomination to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
After a year, he was chosen by Trump to lead the State Department, replacing former Exxon oil executive Rex Tillerson, who clashed with Trump’s policies and his tendency to undermine him publicly.
Pompeo promised to return what he called “arrogance” to a demoralized State Department, but the promise was short-lived. Soon, senior foreign service officers left or were forced to leave, and even middle-level diplomats began to abandon the ship, as Pompeo’s main concern was to bow to Trump’s will, rather than following the practices and diplomatic traditions.
As Trump’s top diplomat, Pompeo embraced and fostered an “America First” policy, although it often resulted in America acting alone.
Pompeo cites as the main achievements of the government’s foreign policy a set of agreements signed by some Arab and Muslim countries to give limited recognition to Israel. He strongly supported Trump’s tougher approach to China, including the imposition of trade tariffs, although nothing has blocked Beijing’s global expansion. He also sought to punish Iran through a “maximum pressure” campaign that did not change the Islamic Republic’s regional activities or reduce potential nuclear production.
“We fundamentally moved to an idea that said we are going to take care of America first, we are going to get it right,” Pompeo told conservative talk show host Ben Shapiro earlier this month. “We are happy to work with our friends and partners, but when we get it right for America, when we are realistic about what we can do and the things we cannot do … we can be a force for good in the world.”
Pompeo mirrored Trump in other ways – the secretary was criticized for how he used his office and for not tolerating dissension.
He spoke at the Republican National Convention in August – from Jerusalem, where he was on an official trip, that watchdog groups said they probably violated federal law that prohibits government officials from engaging in such open political activities. In his speech, he praised “Trump’s bold initiatives in almost every corner of the world.”
In May, Pompeo fired the inspector general who was investigating his attempts to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia because of Congressional prohibitions and his alleged personal use of federal resources. Each of the two succeeding general inspectors left after a few months under duress, while Pompeo attacked his work.
A report by the inspector general concluded that Pompeo’s repeated inclusion of his wife, Susan, on official trips did not violate the law, but that the secretary’s office did not provide sufficient documentation. Another investigation pending in Congress questions his lectures in American states – decisive states – before the November 3 presidential election.
When Trump dispatched his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, last year to try to dig up the dirt from his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, in Ukraine, Pompeo sidelined. The president ended up trying to pressure the Ukrainian president to start an investigation into Biden’s son, Hunter, in exchange for the release of desperately needed military aid.
“Allowing Rudy Giuliani to become Ukraine’s secretary of state – to serve political goals that were clearly illegal – will always be Pompeo’s most shameful moment,” said Stephen Sestanovich, diplomacy scholar at Columbia University and fellow at the Council of Relations Exteriors.
The last straw for many American diplomats came when Pompeo refused to support U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, while Giuliani and Trump tried to tarnish her reputation after she was called to testify at the president’s impeachment hearings.
Pompeo also received considerable contempt for refusing to blame Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and his apparent heir, Mohammed bin Salman, for the horrific death of Saudi journalist and United States resident Jamal Khashoggi. The journalist was murdered in October 2018 at the Saudi Consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul. Numerous independent human rights organizations blame the Saudi government for his death.
But Pompeo, responding to a wave of opposition in the US Congress, attacked the “meowing Capitol” and accepted the Saudi government’s explanation that it blamed a dishonest operation.
Pompeo never masked his latent contempt for many journalists he considers opposed to the Trump administration. For challenging questions, he told reporters that they were “rude” or that the question was “ridiculous”. At a news conference, he repeated the name of a BBC journalist over and over, as if scolding her for asking the question. When an interview with an NPR journalist about Iran and Ukraine did not go as he expected, he released a press release condemning her.
In Shapiro’s December 15 interview, Pompeo said that many American journalists are “indebted” to the Chinese Communist Party, which is why they no longer support Trump.
He spent his last weeks in office acting as if it were business as usual, telling reporters that he was preparing to inaugurate the next Trump administration, and then rushing into final actions, like new sanctions on Iran. Like Trump, he also invited hundreds of people for extravagant parties and held meetings often without a mask, against public health councils – until he was exposed to the coronavirus and forced to quarantine. (He never tested positive, said his office)
“Nothing is more important for a secretary of state to know than which issues can be successfully addressed only by the United States and which require the help of others,” said Sestanovich, the Columbia University scholar. “Pompeo seemed to think that you can solve this problem with ‘arrogance’ – you can’t.”