WASHINGTON (AP) – Mike Pompeo does not fade away quietly. In his last days as Secretary of State, he issues orders that have caused international uproar and tweets a storm about his official and personal accounts to bolster his legacy as a leading promoter of President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ doctrine.
With a possible eye for a presidential run in 2024, Pompeo has doubled down on his support for Trump, even as other cabinet members have resigned or remained out of sight in the wake of the Capitol violence. While the House discussed Trump’s role in encouraging the riot, Pompeo sent out a tweet promoting Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Over the past week, Pompeo has celebrated controversial policies likely to be overturned by his successor, criticisms of what he believes has been dishonest reporting, and has complained about alleged censorship by conservatives on social media.
And as a sign of his post-Trump ambitions, he urged followers of his official State Department Twitter account to start following his personal one.
While it is not uncommon for outgoing cabinet members to declare their successes, Pompeo takes it a step further by wrecking his predecessors in the national security community, some of whom will play prominent roles in President-elect Joe Biden’s administration.
“Do you remember this Middle East” expert? ” He said it couldn’t happen. We did it, ”Pompeo said in a poignant tweet featuring a video clip by John Kerry saying that the Arab countries would not recognize Israel without an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Kerry, a former secretary of state, will serve as a climate envoy in the Biden government.
Pompeo, already the most political of the recent secretaries of state, has faced even the slightest criticism, accusing his critics of being misleading, unintelligent, or incompetent. He has ignored the advice of his own advisers by moving on to pet projects, some of which seem designed to complicate Biden’s presidency.
Since last Saturday he has:
– Re-lifted long-term restrictions on US contacts with Taiwan, one of the main results being China getting angry.
—Yemen’s Houthi rebels have been declared a terrorist organization, a move that the United Nations and aid agencies say could aggravate the already humanitarian disaster.
– Re-brand Cuba as “state sponsor of terrorism”, an action that will hinder or at least delay any attempt by Biden to improve ties with Havana.
– accused Iran of deep and long-standing ties to Al-Qaeda, a statement many in the intelligence community find exaggerated given the history of animosity between the two.
The actions are in line with a strict “America First” policy that he has long embraced with enthusiasm.
He has attacked China, Iran, various UN agencies, multilateral institutions such as the International Criminal Court, and bilateral treaties such as arms control agreements with Russia, two of which the Trump administration retired during his time as America’s top diplomat.
As for Iran, Pompeo has been particularly harsh, re-imposed all sanctions relaxed by the Obama administration after the 2015 nuclear deal, and added more sanctions. He also advocated the assassination of a top Iranian general in Iraq early last year and has been at the forefront of encouraging Sunni Arab states to unite against predominantly Shia Iran.
“The foreign policy blob is constantly looking for a moderate within the Iranian regime who will ‘normalize’ relations,” Pompeo said this week. “The reality is you have a better chance of finding a unicorn.”
Pompeo has made it a sport to destroy China, Cuba and international organizations, as well as Obama officials who he says were hopelessly naive in their negotiations with them.
“As the UN’s top contributor, I have put the American taxpayer and America’s interests first,” Pompeo tweeted Monday. It was accompanied by a photo of former President Barack Obama, Kerry, Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Obama’s UN Ambassador Samantha Power to the United Nations. Along with Kerry, Rice and Power have also been named to prominent positions in Biden’s administration.
Despite all efforts to celebrate the Trump administration’s foreign policy, Pompeo and the State Department have played minimal roles in some of the largest areas, with the White House taking the lead. That was most notable in what Trump supporters see as one of his peak achievements, improving Israel’s ties with its Arab neighbors.
Led by Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, the government ruthlessly promoted Israeli-Arab peace efforts, culminating in agreements to normalize relations between the Jewish state and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. Pompeo and the State Department were largely absent from that diplomacy, with the exception of Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who reports mainly to the White House.
Pompeo’s State Department was effectively locked out of Kushner’s much-discussed Israeli-Palestinian peace vision – and the Secretary of State was not present at the 2019 rollout of the economic part of the plan in Bahrain. Pompeo and other cabinet members attended the unveiled the political piece of the proposal last January, but his role in drafting the plan, which was immediately rejected by the Palestinians, is murky.
On Thursday, Pompeo praised Trump’s decision in March 2019 to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which it captured from Syria in 1967. He tweeted a video of himself and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking that night at Netanyahu’s Jerusalem home with the caption, “I will never forget this moment.” Still, he and his delegation were unaware of the timing of the decision in the Golan Heights, which Trump made after consulting with Kushner minutes before Pompeo was due to meet Netanyahu.
Likewise, the State Department took a back seat in Kushner’s negotiations to get Morocco to normalize ties with Israel, with the US recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over the former Spanish territory of Western Sahara.
Pompeo has invalidated a decades-old US legal position on the legality of Jewish settlements on land claimed by the Palestinians. On his last visit to Israel in November, Pompeo became the first Secretary of State to visit a settlement, and on Thursday he proudly promoted a West Bank wine named after him.
“L’Chaim to Pompeo wine!” Pompeo said on Twitter.