Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said President Trump would be remembered for jettisoning decades of wrongheaded bipartisan consensus on China, recalibrating U.S. policy to recognize Beijing as a belligerent regime intent on supplanting America as the preeminent superpower.
In an interview to discuss his tenure as Trump’s top diplomat, Pompeo told the Washington Examiner that the United States is in a stronger position to counter China than four years ago because of key foreign policy decisions made by the outgoing president. Pompeo said Trump’s innovative strategy started with Washington’s crackdown on Beijing’s unfair trade practices, broadening to enlist a coalition of nations to join the U.S. in combating the panoply of dangers presented by the rising Asian power.
“Every foreign policy decision that is made ought to be run through the filter of how does this impact the Chinese Communist Party and the threat that it poses to the world,” Pompeo said Monday during an interview in his State Department office. “It is that central to American national security.”
The U.S. cultivated China as an ally a half-century ago as a part of a policy to contain the Soviet Union, head off a destabilizing communist alliance, and win the Cold War. In the 1990s, Democrats and Republicans in Washington encouraged Beijing to join the West, believing that a China that thrived economically would buy U.S. products and evolve into a benign, democratic country. The opposite happened.
Trump succeeded in his first presidential campaign partly because he pinpointed China as an economic and national security menace to the U.S. President-elect Joe Biden never challenged that assessment. But he and other Democrats said Trump failed to achieve results, pointing to an unresolved trade war that hurt U.S. farmers and Beijing’s continued hostility to U.S. interests and aggressive bullying of other nations in the Asia-Pacific region.
Asked if Trump erred in discarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiated by Barack Obama, Pompeo said that the president distrusts multilateral agreements and claimed it was not a hindrance to U.S. policy toward China. The TPP, an agreement with several Asian nations, would have tied China’s neighbors to the U.S. economically and provided Washington with a potent tool for checking the ambitions of the ruling communist party.
“I think what we will see over the coming years is you’ll see these nations have much closer economic relations with the United States of America than they will with the Chinese Communist Party,” Pompeo said. “When I talk to the leaders of these countries, they get the joke. They get that the Chinese Communist Party has used them as a vassal state and the United States of America views them as a friend and a partner.”
Pompeo, 56, spent six years in the House representing Kansas before becoming the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the outset of Trump’s administration. When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was fired in March 2018, Pompeo moved over from the CIA. Trump trusts Pompeo, and he is popular with grassroots conservatives. Yet, establishment Republicans still view Pompeo as an ally.
That, combined with Pompeo’s domestic travel and his efforts to cultivate relationships among political and business leaders, has prompted speculation that the secretary is eyeing a 2024 presidential bid. The secretary said he has made no decisions about his political future. The following is a transcript of the interview with Pompeo, edited for length and clarity.
Washington Examiner: What did you accomplish at the State Department, and what do you [think] the lasting impact of those accomplishments will be?
Pompeo: I had this enormous advantage. I came here after being the CIA director. It’s a unique place to start one’s time in the administration because I got a chance to see President Trump’s vision. I was briefing him nearly every day, so I got a chance to observe the things that were priorities for the administration as well as to watch how the team was working together. When I came to this role, I knew [the] president’s priorities. This vision of “America first” is intuitive to him — which is that if things are strong here, if America has power (economic power, diplomatic leverage, a military of scale that can deter), then we have a real opportunity to do good things around the world. Happy to work with partners, allies, and friends, but we’re not going to sacrifice American interests for the sake of just being part of some club. So, when you take a look at how that has unfolded — so, the president set the course and said, yep, China is a strategic competitor.
He started with trade, but then, we began to build it out in the other spaces. I think, today, if you said what’s the biggest switch from where previous administrations — and this isn’t political because it was Democrats and Republicans alike — there’s been no president that was prepared to challenge that orthodoxy, which was: If we engage with China, things will get better, and America will be safe. That’s fundamentally untrue. President Trump came to recognize it as untrue and so began to push back all across the spectrum and say we’re going to take this seriously, we’re going to orient our military towards confronting great power competition, places like the Chinese Communist Party, I want my diplomats out working to build out a coalition that understands the threat from the Chinese Communist Party, we’re going to deny them economic leverage and power. So, a good place this all came together was telecommunications, where you have a true military component, a true diplomatic component, with Huawei and these state-owned enterprises. So, [in] every space the president said, go out and execute a vision that protects America from the threat of the Chinese Communist Party. That is an enormous accomplishment that President Trump should get an awful lot of credit for, and I believe with all my heart that will continue because I think the Chinese Communist Party will continue to demand that it continue. We flipped the script in the Middle East, too. Right?
Again, “America first,” the president thinking about — there’s things we can do, there’s things where we ought not to be engaged in. So, you could see the total number of American forces engaged in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan is reduced. But our capacity to deliver good, peaceful outcomes has increased, and whether that’s the Abraham Accords or the enormous pressure we put on the regime in Iran, we have changed the nature of peace and stability there, benefiting the American people. We’ve put a real priority, too, on the central understanding of religious freedom. The president has made it a priority — you see it with what we do with the recognition of Israel — the recognition of Israel’s capital in Jerusalem. Just realistic: like, quick, ask, what’s the capital of Israel? Jerusalem. OK, 100%. So, we recognized it. Who controls the Golan Heights, well, fine, we’ll recognize it. All of these things were driven by a central understanding of what the reality on the ground was, and then, we knew, too, in nations that permit people to practice their own faith in the way that they want, those nations were stronger, too. Regardless of what form their government takes, may not all be democracies. But in every one of those spaces, we built out this agenda for human rights centered on religious freedom, which I am very confident will reap enormous dividends in global security in the years ahead.
Washington Examiner: Given China continues to act aggressively despite Trump’s policies, where are we with China today that we were not four years ago?
Pompeo: Yeah, they had a 50-year head start in thinking about this as an adversarial relationship. We thought, boy, this is just a friend and a partner, and we’re going to sell them a whole bunch of our stuff because there’s 1.4 billion people. They said: We’re going to bide our time and hide our power. And they did that. And so turning that is an extended long process, and it’s my view that every foreign policy decision that is made ought to be run through the filter of: How does this impact the Chinese Communist Party and the threat that it poses to the world? It is that central to American national security. So, where do we stand today that’s different? I could give you half a dozen [examples] off the top of my head. At a NATO foreign ministers meeting, I spent an hour and a half talking about China. That never happened before. NATO’s now thinking about the Chinese threat from cyber capabilities and space capabilities and disinformation campaigns. There’s a group we call the Quad — India, Japan, and Australia, along with the United States. It was out there a little bit. We’ve now built it into an informal institution that understands the challenge. This is beginning to work together to push back against that. So, this is the president’s view of leveraging multiple countries.
People talk about multilateral institutions. I think about multileveraged capabilities, and so, we’ve now built that out to something that is powerful and imposing real costs on the Chinese Communist Party when [it] engages in malign activity. We’ve worked closely with the [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] countries to say, we’re going to be there to support you. When the Chinese Communist Party threatens you in the South China Sea, whether that’s your fisheries or you’re trying to just drill for energy that is yours, that belongs to you, it’s in your exclusive economic zone. Previous administrations said we’re just not going to mess with that — you’re on your own. We’ve said we’ll be there; we’ll provide legal support, diplomatic support, we will speak about the fact that this is inconsistent with international law. We’ll support you in that way. Look at what we’ve done in technology. I remember my first trip when I went to Europe to talk about Huawei and 5G. I got laughed at. Today, there are 60-plus countries that have said we’re only going to operate with trusted vendors. Let me translate that: We’re not going to put Chinese hardware and software in our systems. One hundred-plus telephone companies all around the world and these telcos are the central connectivity, that’s who they sell to, they operate by and through these telcos — 100-plus telcos have said, nope, we’re not going to do that anymore. There’s not a single country that doesn’t understand, when there’s an American diplomat coming to see them, that while they may be dealing with a bilateral relationship, the threat that the Chinese Communist Party poses to their country will be at the top of mine for everybody that works at the United States Department of State.
So, there has been a huge shift in the prism through which the world sees the Chinese Communist Party, and there has begun an awakening. I’ve used the language: The tide is turning, and I think the Chinese Communist Party sees that. It’s why you’ve seen the rhetoric, rhetoric directed at me, personally, rhetoric directed at the United States, when, in fact, all we’re asking — all we’re asking them to do is engage in a set of behaviors that are fair and balanced and reciprocal.
Washington Examiner: Stipulating that Trump’s trade policies are popular with voters, wouldn’t the Trans-Pacific Partnership have been a good tool in your toolbox to help you contain China?
Pompeo: The president had a fundamental view that a set of bilateral trade arrangements benefits the American people more than some complex multilateral institution. Look, we’ve seen the [World Trade Organization] come to be abused by the Chinese Communist Party. Right? So, we’ve seen one example where the global trade organization essentially was hijacked by the Chinese Communist Party. I think the president was very concerned that the same would happen there. I think what we will see over the coming years, is you’ll see these nations have much closer economic relations with the United States of America than they will with the Chinese Communist Party. Look, some of them, they’re close, they’re going to trade, they have long histories together. But make no mistake about it. When I talk to the leaders of these countries, they get the joke. They get that the Chinese Communist Party has used them as a vassal state and the United States of America views them as a friend and a partner. They can see that different. In the end, the results will be that they will long for close, deep relationships with the United States, which will benefit them and, of course, benefit the United States as well.
Washington Examiner: North Korea — Kim Jong Un is as belligerent as he’s ever been.
Pompeo: I don’t think that’s true.
Washington Examiner: OK, explain.
Pompeo: He hasn’t conducted [a] single nuclear test. He hasn’t conducted a single, long-range missile test since that very first time that I went to see him. That’s not nothing. Those are very important capabilities that he remains in need of testing. And I’m optimistic, I’m actually optimistic that Chairman Kim will come to the conclusion — and it may not be on a timeline that we’d prefer, it may not be in a pattern that we would say, that would make the most sense for us. But I’m convinced he will come to the same conclusion that President Trump presented to him. President Trump presented him a proposition. He said, you’re safer without the nuclear weapons, you don’t need that to deter the United States. We didn’t get there yet, but I’m confident that those conversations, those meetings that the president had‚ that I had with him, presented a set of possibilities that will benefit Chairman Kim and his people.
Washington Examiner: In Iran, where the administration pulled out of a deal to contain the regime’s nuclear weapons capabilities, the mullahs are still committed to pursuing that course of action. How do you deter Tehran’s nuclear ambitions short of military action?
Pompeo: More of what we’ve been doing. Today, the [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] is infinitely poorer than it would have been had the administration’s policies before us stayed in place. I think [Iranian President Hassan] Rouhani himself says some $70 billion poorer than they would have been. That’s terror money; that’s blood money that’s not in their hands. To back and reward the Iranians? To give them any economic relief? To allow the French or British to trade there? Remember, even during the [Iran deal,] American businesses weren’t permitted to trade there. How bizarre is that? You cut a deal. You let the French and the Germans go make money and deny American businesses the opportunity. It was crazy. To allow them to do that again, to back down that path, will just reward the very intransigent behavior that you highlighted and create more wealth for them to conduct their malign activity around the world.
You mentioned the Abraham Accords. [Peace between Israel and Gulf states] do not happen without the maximum pressure campaign on the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Gulf states came to see that America was serious — it was going to reduce the capacity for the mullahs and the ayatollah to conduct campaigns against them. They said, that’s a partner we want to be with, we want to partner with that team, that American team, that Israeli team. We want to acknowledge that Israel has a right to exist because we want to benefit from a security and an economic relationship with them. These things are all connected. They began with a fundamental understanding that we weren’t going to allow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to freeze us in place. Don’t forget it’s the Iranians supporting the Palestinians; it’s the Iranians that house al Qaeda. Right? We’ve seen the No. 2 in al Qaeda is killed in Tehran. That’s not just because he was wandering through. This is a regime that’s not just operating its militias around the world, but supporting al Qaeda — the very folks that attacked the United States of America. This policy we got precisely right.
Washington Examiner: Russia — how should the American people understand the U.S. relationship with Vladimir Putin’s Russia?
Pompeo: We’ve tried, I’ve tried, to find places where we can work alongside the Russians. So, for example, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to work on arms control with the Russians — and frankly, were successful getting Vladimir Putin for the first time to say: Happy to put a freeze on warheads. We couldn’t get all the way there with respect to how we were going to verify that. But that’s a big statement for President Putin to make, and I was pleased — but it was important. They have 1,000 nuclear weapons. We need to be serious about the strategic dialogue that we have with them. When I was the CIA director, we worked with them on counterterrorism. And yet, you continue to see them engaging in [malign] activities in Syria, in Ukraine, in places like that that are just inconsistent with how we expect every country to behave. And we can’t reward them for that bad behavior as well. It’s a complicated relationship. They have a big military and a big nuclear capability and one that we have to continue to take seriously.
Washington Examiner: You were among the few senior Trump administration officials to maintain the president’s trust all the way through. How did you do it?
Pompeo: I’ve been asked this question a couple of times. I always think it an odd one. What I’ve done in the administration is the things I’ve done all my life, which is that I understand my role, my place. I know what my duty is. And every day, I get up and execute that as best I can. And that means being part of a team.
I know who the boss is. I know who got 306 electoral votes and who didn’t; that was him, not me. But also knowing that that relationship that he and I developed has been an important one. It’s been important that I could go around and talk to leaders around the world knowing that I had a close relationship with President Trump and that when I came to speak to them, I was confident that I was delivering the president’s message to them. That is essential. I remember former Secretary [of State] Jim Baker being so kind to give me some time before I came in saying that’s the most important thing you have is the credibility you have to deliver President Trump’s message. And so, President Trump and I have lots of conversations about what the right course of action is. I give him my best wisdom and the State Department team puts forth — we give him our best thoughts, our best wisdom. He then says, yep, go do this, don’t go do that, and then, we bust our tail to try and execute that on behalf of him. And, you know, I think in that sense, he has respected that effort. Because he has always known I’m going to tell him the truth as best I know it. When I think we’ve got it wrong or we made a decision that wasn’t right, I’m going to walk in and be crystal clear about what it was, provide him with an alternative as best I can. And then, he knows to, when he makes a decision, I’m going to go do my best to execute it.
