BRUSSELS — Western powers must “build a new liberal order that prevents war and achieves greater prosperity,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged Tuesday in an address on the sidelines of the assembly of NATO’s top ambassadors.
“In the finest traditions of our great democracy, we are rallying the noble nations to build a new liberal order that prevents war and achieves greater prosperity,” Pompeo told a gathering of diplomatic and military officials.
His remarks included the reassurance that the United States remains committed to NATO, but he paired it with a rebuttal of European criticisms that sought to cast President Trump’s foreign policy as a renewal of the post-war order rather than an abandonment of it.
Pompeo said amassing diplomatic treaties isn’t enough, and said they must work better for people.
“Multilateralism has become viewed as an end unto itself. The more treaties we sign, the safer we supposedly are. The more bureaucrats we have, the better the job gets done,” Pompeo said. “Every nation must honestly acknowledge its responsibility to its citizens and ask if the current international order serves the good of its people as well as it could. And if not, we must ask how we can right it.”
Pompeo delivered that message at the German Marshall Fund. The location was chosen in homage to Army Gen. George Marshall, the eventual secretary of state who led the rebuilding of Europe after the Second World War and “helped to create the foundation for the Atlantic alliance,” as a senior State Department official emphasized.
Pompeo’s defense of the new U.S. posture comes at a moment marked by an intensified threat of Russian aggression in eastern Europe — particularly Ukraine, where Moscow has escalated claims to sovereignty over territory annexed from Kiev’s jurisdiction — and the emerging threat of a strategic competition with China.
“Bad actors have exploited our lack of leadership for their own gain,” Pompeo said. “We welcomed China into the liberal order, but never policed its behavior … Russia hasn’t embraced Western values of freedom and international cooperation. It has suppressed opposition voices and invaded the sovereign nations of Georgia and Ukraine.”
Those challenges to the U.S.-led international order loom larger in light of diplomatic tensions within the network of western alliances, as Pompeo’s counterpart at the European Union said Monday.
“President [George H. W.] Bush used to talk about a new world order, based on shared rules and on cooperation among free nations,” Federica Mogherini, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, said in the prepared text of a speech delivered 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.”
[Also read: Pompeo: George H.W. Bush showed ‘the type of leadership that President Trump is boldly reasserting’]
Mogherini has been an arch critic of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. “We believe that this administration has taken decisions that run counter to our collective interest and to our collective security: our European one but also the U.S.’ interest and security,” she said.
European officials are also hesitant about Trump’s expected withdrawal from a landmark Cold War era nuclear arms control treaty that U.S. officials assess Russia has violated. Those are the kinds of divisions that have European leaders fuming at the Trump team.
“Multilateralism for us is a guarantee for global peace and security, and as such it is the best tool that we have to advance our national interests, including, I believe, American interests,” Mogherini said.
Pompeo framed his remarks with a response to such rebukes. Multilateralism alone, he said, is in many ways benefiting countries like Iran and China that are “undermining the international order.”
“When treaties are broken, the violators must be confronted, and the treaties must be fixed or discarded,” he said. “Our administration is thus lawfully exiting or renegotiating outdated or harmful treaties, trade agreements, and other international arrangements that don’t serve our sovereign interests, or the interest of our allies.”
That statement covered the Iran nuclear deal, but also other pacts such as the Paris climate deal, which if favored by European leaders but “would’ve siphoned money from American paychecks and enriched polluters like China.”
Mogherini and Pompeo, while arguing for their opposing paths to a strong western alliance, both tried to avoid overstating the disagreements.
“I don’t want to underplay the breadth and the depth of our disagreements with the current U.S. administration: they’re there and they’re self-evident,” she said in her prepared text. “Sometimes they are so self-evident that they hide all the rest and this is a shame . . .Yet beyond these disagreements, our cooperation with the United States continues to be very close on most files. No other world powers are as close as we are.”
Some of that frustration was evident at the German Marshall Fund, as an attendee called after the exiting Pompeo to ask why he wouldn’t stop to take questions from the audience. But Pompeo also tried to end on a unifying note, warning that autocratic powers will will reshape geopolitics “in their own illiberal image” if the United States and European powers stumble.
“Let’s work together to preserve the free world so that it continues to serve the interests of the people to whom we each are accountable,” he said. “Let’s do so in a way that creates international organizations that are agile, that respect national sovereignty, that deliver on their stated mission, that create value for the liberal order and for the world.”
