Secretary of State Mike Pompeo canceled his final scheduled trip as the top U.S. diplomat and a historic visit to Taiwan by one of his top lieutenants, the State Department announced Tuesday.
“We are expecting shortly a plan from the incoming administration identifying the career officials who will remain in positions of responsibility on an acting basis until the Senate confirmation process is complete for incoming officials,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said Tuesday. “As a result, we are canceling all planned travel this week, including the secretary’s trip to Europe.”
That announcement came less than a full day after Pompeo’s team announced that he would make an overnight trip to Brussels for a meeting this week with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Sophie Wilmes. The blanket cancellation of travel also aborts U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft’s trip to Taiwan, U.S. and Taiwanese officials confirmed.
“We are fully committed to the completion of a smooth and orderly transition process to be finalized over the next eight days,” Ortagus said. “Both the department and the President-elect’s team have been fully engaged for several weeks toward this end, and we are pleased with the level of cooperation and professionalism that has been displayed.”
That explanation left officials and analysts surprised and perplexed. “Both Pompeo and Kelly Craft knew that there was going to be a transition weeks ago … and so I doubt that the trips were canceled because of transition planning,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Zack Cooper said. “As a result, I think the most likely thing is that there was something about one of the two trips itself that suggested that one or both be canceled.”
Pompeo reportedly canceled the trip after officials from the European Union and Luxembourg, a small NATO member and a neighbor to Belgium, resisted meeting with him. “The Europeans snubbed Washington’s top envoy days after the storming of the U.S. Capitol by thousands of supporters of President Donald Trump,” according to Reuters.
Yet, Pompeo’s team was content to announce the trip with an itinerary that featured only meetings with Stoltenberg and Wilmes. “Secretary Pompeo will highlight the enduring importance of the trans-Atlantic partnership, champion NATO’s ongoing success in safeguarding the trans-Atlantic community and adapting to new security challenges, and reaffirm the strength of the bilateral relationship between the United States and Belgium,” Ortagus said Monday.
The blanket cancellation avoids another Taiwan-related controversy with China. The Chinese Communist Party has claimed sovereignty over the island since 1949, but it has never ruled in Taipei, which is the last stronghold of the Nationalist government that was overthrown when Chairman Mao Zedong came to power in Beijing. Craft’s visit would have marked the first trip to Taiwan by a U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
“I don’t think, in the long term, that this is necessarily a bad thing. I think that this trip would have been fairly controversial, not just among American experts on Asia, but also in Taiwan itself, in part because of the timing,” said Cooper, an expert on U.S. strategy in Asia. “It may actually make things a bit easier, not only for the Trump team in the last few days, but also for the Biden team.”
