BRUSSELS — President Trump stands in the foreign policy tradition of the late President George H.W. Bush, according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“American leadership allowed us to enjoy the greatest human flourishing in modern history,” Pompeo said during a Tuesday speech here on the sidelines of the NATO foreign minister summit. “We won the Cold War. We won the peace. At no small measure of George H.W. Bush’s efforts, we reunited Germany. This is the type of leadership that President Trump is boldly reasserting.”
Bush’s death has drawn an outpouring of domestic and international tributes, as he was the last president to fight in the Second World War and the leader of the western world when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. Pompeo’s homage Tuesday elaborated on the personal respect that Trump, who clashed with Jeb Bush and criticized former President George W. Bush during the 2016 elections, has shown.
“He was an unyielding champion of America, and of freedom all around the world,” Pompeo said of Bush. “I actually think that he would be delighted for me to be here today at an institution named after a fellow lover of freedom, George Marshall. And he would have been thrilled to see all of you here – such a large crowd gathered [and] dedicated to our transatlantic bonds, so many decades after they were first forged.”
[Also read: Trump expected to meet privately with Bush family ahead of funeral for George H.W. Bush]
Some European allies remember Bush more wistfully in light of their distaste for Trump’s “America First” platform and the resurgence of great power rivalry with Russia and China.
“President Bush used to talk about a new world order, based on shared rules and on cooperation among free nations,” Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s top diplomat, said in the prepared text of a speech Monday at Harvard University. “Today, I am afraid we have to admit that such a new world order has never truly materialized and worse, there is a real risk today that the rule of the jungle replaces the rule of law. The same international treaties – so many in which we are together – that ended the Cold War are today put into question.”
Mogherini may have been referring to the INF Treaty, a 1987 ban on ground-based intermediate range nuclear missiles negotiated by between then-President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. The United States is expected to withdraw from the pact, citing Russia’s deployment of missiles that violate the agreement, despite years of western protests.
“When treaties are broken, the violators must be confronted, and the treaties must be fixed or discarded,” Pompeo said.
But Pompeo offered that position, which European critics often regard as excessively unilateral, as an inheritance from the 41st president’s model.
“We have to account for the world order of today in order to chart the way forward,” he said. “This is what President Trump is doing. He is returning the United States to its traditional, central leadership role.”
“He sees the world as it is, not as we wish it to be,” Pompeo said of Trump. “He knows that nothing can replace the nation-state as the guarantor of democratic freedoms and national interests. He knows, as George H.W. Bush knew, that a safer world has consistently demanded American courage on the world stage. And when we — all of us — ignore our responsibilities to the institutions we’ve formed, others will abuse them.”
