The Interpreter

“He is very solid on foreign policy — about U.S. interests, about NATO, about Russia, about our allies. … He is what you would want,” a former senior administration official said. “The challenge for someone in his position is to not be seen, ever, as distant from Trump.”

As the last original member of Trump’s foreign policy cast, first as CIA director and now as secretary of state, he has met that challenge. The duration of his success in that effort, despite much upheaval within the administration, has exposed him to charges of sycophancy. His irascibility with journalists contributes to the idea that Pompeo has molded himself in Trump’s image.

Yet conversations with more than a dozen officials who have worked with him — current and former members of Trump’s administration, as well as senior European officials, all of whom offered their views on condition of anonymity — support a different assessment.

The administration’s volatility has stoked uncertainty about the president’s commitment to the Western alliance network. Pompeo has worked to attach Trump’s impulses to the logic of American power that has governed U.S. foreign policy for decades. And when the president’s instructions might corrode that power, according to multiple colleagues, Pompeo has the rare ability to refine and enlarge that directive without seeming to contradict Trump.

“I have seen it happen any number of times,” said one senior U.S. official, “and I never cease to be amazed by the implicit skill.”

Think of it as dual-track diplomacy for the nation’s top diplomat.

“He is translating America First as a concept into a concrete policy that, in his worldview, advances our interests,” said Andy Keiser, a former House Intelligence Committee aide who worked closely with Pompeo during their time on Capitol Hill. “And it’s a two-way translation process — taking Trumpism and the tenets of how he sees the world and translating that to foreign allies … and then backwards, taking what our allies actually care about, translating that into language the president understands.”

Pompeo isn’t running his own foreign policy on the sly, sources agree. Instead, he knows how to “deliver the president a win that’s sort of in his line of thinking,” as a former White House official put it. And he can sidestep Trump’s counterproductive ideas without embarrassing the president.

If Trump’s foreign policy “thinking [is] an archipelago of dots,” as former White House national security adviser John Bolton contends, and if it’s true that Defense Secretary Mark Esper was nearly fired for opposing Trump’s interest in deploying American troops to quell the recent protests in U.S. cities, then Pompeo’s sometimes-improvisational diplomacy is a high-wire act.

“No other secretary of state could have curbed Trump’s worst instincts when it came to some of those decisions on transatlantic issues,” said Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “He shares the president’s clear foreign policy instincts … so he’s able to move Trump off some of the more rash decisions he’s made.”

His attempts to bridge the “strategic chasm,” as veteran foreign-affairs analyst Robert Kagan has described the divisions that have opened in recent decades between U.S. and European foreign policy thinkers, are made more difficult by Trump’s personality and the destabilizing policies his temperament portends. Trump’s public fusillades breed anti-American hostility in European societies, making it more difficult for other democratically elected leaders to align with his administration even if they were inclined to set aside their personal dislike for the president. So Pompeo can tout American-led training exercises in Europe and U.S. sanctions on Russia as signs of the administration’s fidelity to European allies, but Trump’s voice rings in their ears.

If European leaders pay more lip service to Western principles and alliance commitments, they have irritated American officials by seeming hesitant to take seriously the threats emanating from Beijing. The European Union identified China as a “systemic rival” last year, but EU high representative Josep Borrell maintains that “it doesn’t mean that we are embarking in a systematic rivalry.” Chinese Communist authorities brutalize Uighur Muslims — abuses that include the establishment of reeducation camps and, activists report, the use of “mass rape” and forced sterilization as tools of genocide — but European leaders “compartmentalize” such issues from their hope that Chinese investment can help their national economies recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

“So for a lot of countries, China is a problem but not a strategic competitor to the Western system in the way that the U.S. sees that,” a senior European diplomat said, while predicting that European allies won’t adopt “the prevailing philosophy” regnant in Washington. “China is objectively not the Soviet Union.”

That attitude fails to appreciate that the Chinese Communist Party has a combination of economic and military power that the Soviet Union never achieved, according to China hawks. Some American observers fear that Beijing could challenge the United States for global primacy and win.

“We must take off the golden blinders of economic ties and see that the China challenge isn’t just at the gates; it’s in every capital, it’s in every borough, it’s in every province,” Pompeo said in a June 19 address to the virtual Copenhagen Democracy Summit.

Eyes have opened more quickly in Eastern Europe, where former Soviet vassal states have a clear memory of totalitarian rule. Lithuania blew the whistle on China’s “increasingly aggressive” espionage operations in early 2019. Estonia warned in February that Beijing sees European leaders as “useful pawns” in an effort “to impose its own worldview and standards, building a Beijing-led international environment that appeals to China.” In May, Romania scrapped a nuclear reactor construction plan that would have given a controlling stake to a Chinese state-owned company.

On the other hand, Italy has signed up for China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which U.S. officials regard as a predatory lending program designed to give Beijing control of strategic overseas infrastructure. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared himself “very enthusiastic about the Belt and Road Initiative” last year. The coronavirus pandemic has damaged the Chinese Communist Party’s reputation since then, and European military officials have a “pretty straightforward” recognition of the new security threats, but some China hawks believe that political and economic leaders are too slow to follow suit.

“Europeans are keeping their head in the sand,” said one official whose country gained freedom when the USSR died. “How long [can we] put our head in the sand and [say], ‘Please follow your commitments.’ It has been said for the last 30 years, and China did not react.”

Trump’s relationship with his European counterparts was rocky from the start. Trump launched his candidacy just a few months before German Chancellor Angela Merkel unveiled an open-door policy for Syrian asylum-seekers fleeing civil war, all but guaranteeing harsh Trump criticism.

“I always thought Merkel was like this great leader. What she’s done in Germany is insane,” he said in October 2015. By the stretch run of the general election, he was using Merkel not only as a foil for his own campaign but as a weapon against his Democratic rival: “Hillary Clinton wants to be America’s Angela Merkel, and you know what a disaster this massive immigration has been to Germany and the people of Germany.”

The friction isn’t all from one side. Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were caught on video deriding Trump during the 2019 NATO Leader’s Meeting in London. Yet the fundamental problem isn’t the personalities on either side, according to Trump defenders who note that European allies resisted Barack Obama’s gentler entreaties.

“When the Europeans say, ‘Well, we would be more inclined to cooperate with you if you didn’t have this gauche, gaffe-prone president,’ it’s a bit disingenuous,” a former senior official said. “The issue is that Europeans, with a few exceptions, are unwilling to take significantly greater responsibilities, irrespective of who asks them or how they ask.”

The first true goring of a European sacred cow took place in June 2017, when Trump withdrew from the Paris climate deal. “Europeans on the whole are turned off by what they perceive as this administration’s disregard for multilateralism,” the senior European diplomat said. “And that primarily, but not exclusively, comes down to climate change in the Paris Agreement.”

In parallel to the climate policy breach, Trump imposed tariffs on certain European and Canadian products on the grounds that the economic competition represented a national security threat.

The trade conflict hasn’t made life easy for Pompeo. He has urged European nations to bar Huawei from their next-generation wireless technology, which the Beijing-backed tech giant offers to build at bargain bin prices — a tempting proposal, given that 5G is expected to lay golden eggs for the countries quickest to roll out the technology. Pompeo regards the company as a platform for Chinese Communist spy agencies, but even China hawks inclined to agree warn that the trade fight impedes cooperation on the telecommunications issues.

“That cannot happen if there is simultaneously the threat of trade war on the table,” Norbert Roettgen, who chairs the German equivalent of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in February.

The brass-knuckles trade brawls have deepened the impression left by the withdrawal from the Paris deal in European quarters. “For the United States, the international landscape and architecture of institutions and rules and regulations,” a second senior European diplomat assessed, is considered by many in the administration to be “impeding the pursuit of American interests.”

In rebuttal, U.S. officials point to the Trump administration’s cooperation with Latin American allies in the campaign against Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro, an initiative spearheaded by Organization of American States Secretary-General Luis Almagro a year before Trump took office, as evidence that the administration has a sincere interest in reforming the multilateral order to work more effectively with allies.

“Multilateralism has too often become viewed as an end unto itself,” Pompeo said at the German Marshall Fund in Brussels in December 2018. “Our call is especially urgent in light of the threats we face from powerful countries and actors whose ambition is to reshape the international order in its own illiberal image.”

The coronavirus pandemic, paradoxically, has reinforced Pompeo’s argument while intensifying European frustrations with Trump. The World Health Organization’s senior leaders praised China’s response to the outbreak while suppressing their own misgivings about Beijing’s lack of transparency. And then Trump stunned the world by announcing that the U.S. would withdraw from the WHO, which is the default public health agency for many countries.

In any case, Pompeo has launched a campaign to increase U.S. influence at multilateral institutions. The death of International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Yukiya Amano last year created a leadership vacuum that attracted Pompeo’s attention. This contest sorted into a two-man race between Cornel Feruta, the Romanian diplomat who was Amano’s top aide, and Argentine envoy Rafael Grossi. Russia and China backed Feruta, while the U.S. supported Grossi.

It was a difficult race, from the U.S. perspective, because major democratic nations were split, according to two sources familiar with the contest. The EU lobbied on behalf of Feruta, the “continuity candidate” who also enjoyed the support of the United Kingdom and Japan. The division may have reflected a perception that Feruta’s victory would be more conducive to protecting the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, but France favored Grossi, as did India. It ended in victory for the U.S.-backed Argentinean, a multiple-ballot struggle that turned into a rout as Feruta’s supporters recognized that the tide had turned. “That was a big win for Pompeo,” a former White House official said.

It came on the heels of China romping to victory in its bid to lead the United Nations Food and Agriculture Office last summer, due to similar divisions among democratic powers. “The Americans and the French were in different camps,” a senior European diplomat said. “And this meant that the Chinese could come through the middle.”

The envoy described that defeat as “a wake-up call” for Western nations. In January, Pompeo tapped career foreign service officer Mark Lambert as his point man for “countering the malign influences of the PRC and others” at the U.N. Two months later, it was time to choose a new leader of the World Intellectual Property Office. The U.S. rallied a coalition in support of Singaporean candidate Daren Tang, who bridged the typical divide between developed and developing countries and trounced China’s nominee.

“Fundamentally, the battle in the international organization landscape is really between the United States and China over influence,” said Dubowitz. “It plays out in subplots with the Europeans, but it’s really a battle between Beijing and Washington.”

The scope of that battle has been overlooked by some Europeans. One EU official, who acknowledged being unaware of Lambert’s office, explained the blind spot by drawing a contrast with Pompeo’s suspicion that China wields its multilateral influence in bad faith. “This is not the way we look at things,” an EU official said. “We deal with partners within the frameworks we have, and we expect our partners to, you know, play by the rules.”

In that spirit, European allies felt like they had more friends in high places early in Trump’s presidency. James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, White House chief of staff John Kelly, national security adviser H.R. McMaster — the quartet represented the “adults in the room” whose much-admired maturity seemed manifest in their known differences with Trump. All were gone by the beginning of this year. They left behind, some observers suggested, “a cast of enablers” who lack good judgment.

That summation fails to capture the role that Pompeo plays in the administration, according to current and former officials, as well as outside observers who know him and follow the administration’s doings.

It’s true that he is regarded as a faithful lieutenant. “A lot of people forget, including people working within the administration, that elections matter and they ultimately work for the commander in chief,” said American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Michael Rubin. “Pompeo understands this better than most, given his military background.”

First in his class at West Point, an editor of the Harvard Law Review who did a stint at a white-collar law firm in D.C. — the working-class California native has the kind of resume you’d expect of someone fourth in line to the presidency. He’s also a Kansas businessman who rode the 2010 Tea Party wave into elected office, uniting his high-society credentials with a strong sense for how grassroots Republican primary voters rally around conservative outsiders.

“Mike Pompeo is a politician serving as secretary of state, and so, he has very good political instincts of what makes a good news story, what is good messaging, what are the domestic political implications of any decision that he might make,” said a former White House official who worked on foreign policy. “And Pompeo is this unique combination of policy intellect with strong political instincts and ambitions, where he’s able to modulate everything he does to, you know, maximize his effectiveness.”

Trump, said another former senior administration official, “has a lot of attitudes which are fleeting. On the other issues that the president is not as worked up on, Pompeo gets to empower people to run the right policies.”

Pompeo enjoys those privileges because Trump trusts him. He has preserved that confidence “by not picking battles where he may personally disagree, but instead leaning into the areas where he has the most interest in agreement with the president,” said a different observer, the former White House official.

It helped Pompeo’s cause with Trump that he was a strident opponent of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal as a congressman. His arrival at Foggy Bottom in April 2018 foreshadowed the U.S. withdrawal from the deal a month later, a pact denounced by Trump throughout the presidential campaign but favored by much of the national security team that he assembled in 2017.

If Pompeo troubled European allies by orchestrating Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran, he would soon have an opportunity to preserve a semblance of stability. European allies were resigned to Trump’s impending departure from the Iran deal, but Trump assured Macron in April 2018 that he would keep U.S. forces in Syria.

Trump abandoned that pledge in December of that year when he tweeted that “we have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.” The flip-flop upended the policy that Pompeo’s team had been implementing, with hardly a word of warning to American diplomats, much less the French. Mattis resigned within days, citing his respect for U.S. allies.

The drama is emblematic of Trump’s willingness to make momentous announcements on topics ranging from U.S. troop deployments to the mid-pandemic freeze of American funding for the World Health Organization without apparent regard for allied interests. “The president is not a linear thinker,” one senior U.S. official said. “He doesn’t sit down and talk through, ‘What’s our Syria policy for the next 12 months?’ He doesn’t have seminars, he doesn’t read 12-page papers on a subject like that.”

For Europeans, the process is almost worse than the policy outcome.

“Having allies means actually factoring in problems and interests that are not necessarily your own,” the second senior European diplomat said. “Some are important, some are not, but you actually have to consult about it, and that’s not happening right now. And I think China sees that as an opening.”

Yet Pompeo’s defenders observe that “he’s been able to walk the president back” at least twice regarding Syria, as Dubowitz put it. Trump has announced troop withdrawals following two separate phone calls with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who regards America’s Kurdish partners against ISIS as terrorists. And yet, U.S. troops remain in key places in the country.

Pompeo would never admit that the policy had shifted in any substantial way. This posture is central to how he wields influence. “There are policies the president has announced, and I myself will think, ‘My God, I can’t believe that we’re doing this … [it’s] offensive, ridiculous, barbaric,’” a senior U.S. official said. “I will hear Secretary Pompeo explain basically exactly the same thing that President Trump just announced, but … Pompeo will make it sound like the most absolutely logical thing.”

That ability reflects Pompeo’s fluency with his portfolio, honed in one-on-one meetings with critics whom he trusts to be discreet.

“Pompeo wants the ability to debate through ideas with people who disagree with the administration,” one conversation partner said. “He’s much more willing than other secretaries of state have been to have substantive debates privately with people that he knows won’t leak the contents of these discussions to the press. He’s much more intellectually self-confident.”

Yet Pompeo gets irritated when put in danger of acknowledging the difference between the president’s unvarnished intention and his polished reconfiguration. His most explosive public clash involved an interview with NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly, who questioned whether he provided adequate support to ousted U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

Pompeo had insulated Yovanovitch, the envoy whose firing at Rudy Giuliani’s behest foreshadowed the impeachment war, from Trump’s hostility for much of 2018 and the spring of 2019, by most insider accounts. “He tried for as long as he could to protect her,” one former senior U.S. official said. When the president insisted on recalling her in May 2019, he acquiesced. Then-Deputy Secretary John Sullivan’s team affirmed in private that she “had done nothing wrong,” but they didn’t condemn Giuliani’s attacks in the media.

Kelly asked if he “owe[d] Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch an apology,” an exchange that led to an embarrassing off-air confrontation. The secretary’s team insisted that her line of questioning violated preestablished terms of the interview, but observers close to the situation believe his anger also stemmed from the inability to defend himself without alienating Trump.

“It gets to this dilemma that he has: In order to be effective as the secretary, he can’t be publicly speaking out for [Yovanovitch], which is a way of publicly rebuking Trump,” another former senior administration official said. “She put her finger on exactly that sore point, where he’s getting criticized, and taking it, for something that is actually not true — but he can’t say that.”

Pompeo is more disciplined in his private diplomatic meetings, though he could afford perhaps to be more endearing in his public rhetoric. Pompeo’s performance at the 2020 Munich Security Conference, the theme of which was “Westlessness,” was long on contradicting the hosts’ misgivings and short on the strategic empathy that persuasion requires.

“Sometimes, he relishes sticking a finger in the eye of someone else, whether it be Europeans as a whole, news organizations, all of that,” another former senior administration official said. “Even when sometimes these speeches don’t go over well with the audience, he still thinks it’s a success because he gave it to them — because he spoke truth to power.”

There are signs that the Trump administration and European leaders are moving toward a consensus. The NATO meeting in London produced an unprecedented acknowledgment of the “opportunities and challenges” presented by China’s growing power. European Union officials have acknowledged that China does “not share the same values, political systems, or approach to multilateralism.” Borrell, the EU high representative, invited Pompeo to a dialogue that the secretary of state hopes “will enhance our collective shared knowledge and our collective responses.”

That conversation might reveal core agreements on China often obscured by more superficial disputes about Trump’s personality or differing attitudes toward multilateral institutions. “We don’t like the changing profile of China, as it’s getting more and more [to be the] systemic rival and the strategic competitor,” the second senior European diplomat said. “If we’re all together, China will probably redo the calculus.”

Such unity might be challenged by the uncertainty around Trump’s stated desire to slash the American troop presence in Germany — a “strategic crime” of a decision, according to conservative critics, and one that has drawn bipartisan congressional opposition. A former administration official predicted that Pentagon officials will “create some short-term accounting” that appears to implement the letter of the reduction order, if not its spirit. In the meantime, Pompeo is grafting Trump’s desire into a more substantive discussion about how to orient the U.S. military to manage 21st-century threats.

“When you see what we ultimately conclude and we ultimately deliver on the statements that the president has made,” Pompeo told the German Marshall Fund’s Brussels Forum recently, it will be apparent “that they’re aimed squarely at what we believe to be democracies’ fundamental interests, and certainly America’s most fundamental interest.”

If Trump’s decision is implemented in a way that disproves the recent criticism, don’t expect the secretary of state to admit that it ever could have turned out otherwise. “This is the world in which Pompeo lives,” a senior U.S. official said. “He just has to make it work.”

Joel Gehrke is a national security reporter for the Washington Examiner.