BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — Slovakia and other central European nations should remain within the “transatlantic community of democracies,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged in the face of Russian and Chinese encroachment in the region.
“The United States has stood with the people of Slovakia as a friend, as a partner, and as an ally for the last 30 years,” Pompeo said. “And we will stand with you in the decades to come.”
“This relationship was built on shared values and now we must sustain it on those same, especially as Russian aggression undermines freedom on this continent, but also against a China that represses people while its expanding its influence abroad,” he added.
“These are important engagements,” Pompeo said before a meeting with Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini. “To compete – to compete against those who want to undermine democracy and undermine freedom here in Slovakia is the primary reason why I want to be here today.”
Pompeo recalled how Slovakia “cast off this Soviet yoke” 30 years ago after greeting five former political prisoners at the Gate of Freedom Memorial, where the Danube and Morava rivers meet to form a border between Austria and Slovakia. The narrow waterway offered families separated by the Iron Curtain a glimpse of each other, along with an attractive yet treacherous hope of freedom for would-be defectors, often dashed by swirling currents and Soviet sharpshooters.
Pompeo is the first secretary of state to visit Slovakia in two decades. He was prompted to return to a region neglected by former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s top diplomats due to Russian and Chinese success in expanding diplomatic and commercial ties in central Europe, a soft-power alarm aggravated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
“If we don’t win in central and Eastern Europe, where do we win?” a senior State Department official told reporters earlier Tuesday.
Thirty years after the revolutions that overthrew several communist governments of the old Warsaw Pact, Pompeo’s team hopes that recalling that history can help consolidate the alliances with the young democratic societies.
“Putin is constantly in these countries,” a senior State Department official told reporters earlier Tuesday. “China shows up with big money.”
Beijing has made major diplomatic and commercial investment in central Europe, wooing NATO members such as Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia with billions in loans and the hope of technological development. The insertion of Chinese telecommunications networks into NATO member-states could compromise military cooperation within the alliance in a crisis, U.S. and European officials believe.
It could also hamper political dialogue in peacetime if even a handful of leaders of small European Union member-states are tempted by the corrupting influence of a wealthy Communist patron.
“It pretty much undermines the whole alliance,” a European official told the Washington Examiner.
Pompeo’s course through the central European capital Tuesday was filled with historical and political symbolism. The memorial marked his first stop of the day, just as he began Monday’s work in Budapest with a viewing of a Ronald Reagan statue that likewise served to recall Cold War history.
He viewed the likeness of another American president, a bronze bust of Woodrow Wilson, at the Slovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which erected the monument in acknowledgment of Wilson’s role in the establishment of Czechoslovakia, a principality carved out of the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War.
