With fiery defenses of President Donald Trump’s order to kill Iran’s Major General Qassem Soleimani, Mike Pompeo has emerged as the most powerful Secretary of State in decades, rivaling the legacies of Henry Kissinger, James Baker, and Condoleezza Rice for his unchallenged access to the Oval Office.
After the forced departures of national security adviser John Bolton, a notable hawk, and Defense Secretary James Mattis, a more cautious, pragmatic military advisor, Pompeo is the sole survivor of Trump’s original national security team. He is far more experienced than Robert O’Brien, the replacement for Bolton, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Unlike Esper, who pushed back against the president’s recent threat to bomb Iran’s cultural sites if the country’s leaders sought revenge for Soleimani’s death, Pompeo argued forcefully Tuesday that the President had not suggested targeting Iran’s cultural sites. Destroying cultural sites is considered a war crime, forbidden by a 1954 agreement signed by the United States.
But on Air Force One Sunday night, the president clearly suggested that was under consideration, telling reporters: “They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural sites? It doesn’t work that way.”
When those comments were read back to Pompeo on Tuesday, he seemed to come up with his own interpretation of international law in defending the president. “I was unambiguous on Sunday,” he said. “It is completely consistent with what the President has said…. Every action we take will be consistent with the international rule of law.”
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Pompeo is a graduate of Harvard Law School, was first in his class at West Point, and was a prominent member of the House Benghazi committee that grilled then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2015 for 11 hours about her responsibility for the deaths of four Americans killed in a terror attack on a diplomatic outpost in Libya on Sept. 11th, 2012.
Many diplomatic observers believe the Benghazi example animated both Pompeo and Trump when they watched scenes of pro-Iranian rioters trying to storm the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, solidifying their determination to strike back forcefully against Iran.
Top officials told NBC News Pompeo upset some of his own team by cancelling a long-delayed trip to Ukraine in order to ride herd on the response to Iran. The stakes were very high: The New York Times reported Sunday that Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence were the two hawks on the national security team arguing for a strong response to Iranian aggression. And The Washington Post reported this week that Pompeo had been “morose” last summer when, with only 10 minutes to spare, the president decided not to respond militarily after Iran downed a U.S. surveillance drone.
Trump also restrained his advisors last September by not retaliating when Iranian proxies struck Saudi Arabia’s largest oil field. Multiple diplomatic sources tell NBC News that the Saudis were distressed by the lack of American support, to the point of reaching out to their arch-rival Iran for back channel diplomacy, through Pakistan.
All this set the backdrop for what critics called an over-correction with the strike that killed Soleimani. Pressed today to further clarify his claim that the strike was based on intelligence of an “imminent threat,” Pompeo added to the confusion by saying, “if you’re looking for imminence, you need to look no further than the days that led up to the strike that was taken against Soleimani.”
Was it a future threat or past aggression that led to the strike? The only thing clear from the secretary’s remarks was that he was in lockstep with the president.
Pompeo has so far withstood intense criticism privately within the State Department and publicly from former top U.S. diplomats for not coming to the aid of ousted Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, and for not putting a stop to Rudy Giuliani’s parallel diplomacy with Ukraine, both of which were investigated by the House impeachment committees.
He has declined to furnish any emails or other State Department documents to the House investigators, a posture that severely damaged morale among foreign service officers, according to multiple accounts. Many of the veterans had placed high hopes on Pompeo’s arrival because of his powerful alliance with the president, in contrast with his fired predecessor, Rex Tillerson, who remained an outsider.
The bottom line: with less-experienced new leaders at the Pentagon, an acting director of national intelligence and an untested national security adviser, Mike Pompeo is very much in charge.
He has acknowledged ambitions to run for president one day, but declared definitively Tuesday he will not run for the open Senate seat this year in his home state of Kansas, telling reporters, “I’ve said that I’m going to stay serving as Secretary of State so long as President Trump shall have me.”
