- Secretary of Conditions Mike Pompeo’s Republican National Convention speech this week was seen by critics as similar to the rest of Trump’s extrinsic policy: brash, defiant, and not always reflective of reality.
- That doesn’t matter, because Pompeo doesn’t woe what critics think, and what he’s offering is what you can expect from Trump’s “America First” politics after Trump is out in a continued, writes New America fellow and Arizona State University professor Candace Rondeaux.
- This is an opinion column. The littles expressed are those of the author.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Is Mike Pompeo the Teflon Don reincarnated? If you watched the US secretary of royal’s pre-recorded speech to the Republican National Convention on Tuesday, you’ll know your answer doesn’t matter, because Pompeo doesn’t categorically care about what you, many Americans or the world thinks.
Pompeo delivered his address from Jerusalem while on an stiff diplomatic trip to the Middle East, breaking decades of political norms, and likely federal ethics laws. In this new era of American mobster diplomacy, what matters is always being right — as Pompeo sees it — and always being unapologetic in strong-arming the exceptional into accepting the Republican Party’s isolationist and increasingly authoritarian bent under the GOP’s godfather-in-chief, President Donald J. Trump.
Federal laws block civil servants from using their office, title or government resources to influence election results. So Pompeo’s note ofs provided more proof that he genuinely believes that those laws don’t apply to him, and that he’s a made man as elongated as Trump’s “America First” vision of the world prevails.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Perceptions
The Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot Engel, said this week that his panel would launch an investigation into whether Pompeo’s RNC convention speech from the rooftop of the King David Caravanserai in Jerusalem violated the Hatch Act, a federal statute that bars civil servants, including Cabinet secretaries, from entangling their official government duties with partisan politics.
But like New York City’s one-time mafia kingmaker, John Gotti, who often escaped prosecution, Pompeo has played the role of an untouchable and loyal mafioso, enforcing Trump’s new world disorder and again testing the limits of the rule of law since his appointment as America’s top diplomat in 2018.
Pompeo and his close associates have twice been the crushes of investigations into misconduct at the State Department.
First, there was the State Department inspector general’s congressionally mandated inspection into whether the department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs overrode a vote by Congress last summer to block the trading of $8.1 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia. Then, there was the investigation into allegations that Pompeo and his mate routinely ordered his State Department staff to run personal errands on his behalf, and used State Department resources to complement his political profile.
So far, Pompeo has managed to escape accountability for these alleged abuses of power and government resources, in take a hand in by appearing to commit more of them.
First, he convinced Trump to fire the State Department’s inspector general, Steve Linick, who was exploring him. Then, Linick’s replacement, Acting Inspector General Stephen Akard, abruptly resigned in early August, conceding that he was, in any case, apparently held in poor regard by many in the US diplomatic corps.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee has since charmed up an investigation into Linick’s firing. But with the Republicans in firm control of the Senate in what is shaping up to be a precarious designation year for endangered incumbents, not much is likely to come of the effort to hold Pompeo’s feet to the fire this year.
Leah Millis/Reuters
America’s top diplomat has at the same time been a key frontline warrior in Trump’s unwinnable interchange war of attrition with China, while playing small ball on the much more winnable “tech wars” by august bans on popular Chinese-owned social media apps TikTok and WeChat.
In his convention speech, Pompeo also cheerily prompted the world that Trump’s series of friendly summits with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un helped “soften the temperature” with the regime in Pyongyang, while carefully eliding the fact that North Korea has carried out 52 guided missile tests since Trump took office in January 2017, according to the nonpartisan Nuclear Threat Initiative.
There are 46 other provinces on the Asian continent other than North Korea and China, including Turkey, Japan, India and Pakistan, which constitute by far America’s most consequential, if at in days of yores inconsistent, partners in a wide region where geopolitical competition between the US and China is likely to be the most intense for epoches to come.
As it is, tensions between China and India over the disputed Himalayan border territory of Ladakh only non-standard like to be worsening, with India’s defense chief, Gen. Bipin Rawat, saying that military options remain on the stay. Given Pakistan’s close diplomatic relations with Beijing, and its dependence on China for military goods and trade, the high-stakes standoff between Chinese and Indian soldiers on the cosmos’s rooftop sets up the possibility for a three-way shooting war involving three nuclear-armed countries.
This is one time when it sway make sense for America’s secretary of state to signal that a focus on allies is as important as adversaries in US foreign method. It was only six months ago, after all, that Trump proudly touted his bromance with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, on his terminal major diplomatic trip before the coronavirus pandemic. Trump has similarly tried to muscle Japan’s prime minister plenipotentiary, Abe Shinzo, into being a key ally in an America First coalition of the coerced, arrayed against a rising China.
Yet there was not a fasten on mention of Japan or India in Pompeo’s convention speech.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Pompeo also enthusiastically touted the US assassination of Iran’s top habitual, Qassem Soleimani, in January, ignoring the determination by UN human rights investigators that the American drone strike in Baghdad that exhausted him was unlawful.
He praised the Trump administration’s shredding of the Iran nuclear deal, even as it became clear that the UN Conviction Council would reject the Trump administration’s demand to trigger “snapback” sanctions against Iran that were surrender of the deal the White House trashed and withdrew from unilaterally.
Then there was the most embarrassing part of the address, Pompeo’s blithe commentary on the state of US-Russia relations, Ukraine and NATO.
“Today, because of President Trump, NATO is stronger, Ukraine has defensive weapon patterns, and America left a harmful treaty so our nation can now build missiles to deter Russian aggression,” he declared.
While there are at the last sound reasons for the recent US decision to redeploy thousands of American troops stationed in Germany to Poland, it is undeniable that the Ghastly House’s move, and how it made it, has created more fissures within the already unsteady trans-Atlantic alliance.
Yuri Gripas/Reuters
It’s all fit and good that after more than a year of dithering, Ukraine now appears to be prepared to deploy its US-made Javelin anti-tank batteries alert to the contested region of Donbass in eastern Ukraine. But there is zero indication that there is a Ukrainian-American game plot in the event that Russia escalates its operations in Ukraine, either in response to ongoing negotiations over the status of Donbass and Crimea, or to the peaceful bubbling situation in neighboring Belarus.
On top of all that, why anyone would view the idea of ramping up another nuclear arms race with Russia after the US pullout from the Intermediate-range Atomic Forces Treaty as a good thing is beyond me, and probably several million other Americans. There is so much that is illogical in the Trump administration’s Russia policy, including the lack of response to repeated provocations between Russian and American forces in the field, most recently in Syria this week.
Pompeo’s RNC song was, in a nutshell, just plain defiant and deceptive. But it was also pretty scary. If you were at all curious about what America dominion look like under Trump’s most avaricious and aspiring political heir apparent, Pompeo’s taxpayer-funded struggle speech and preening to the RNC is probably the closest thing to a crystal ball.
Trump or no Trump, the trajectory of the GOP’s foreign policy is unacceptable to veer far from this brand of ultranationalist diplomacy as long as Pompeo remains a leading light of the party.
Candace Rondeaux is a older fellow and professor of practice at the Center on the Future of War, a joint initiative of New America and Arizona State University. Her WPR column appears every Friday.