Mike Pompeo closed the door on any speculation he might run for the open Senate seat in Kansas next year. “I am going to stay here,” he said in an exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner. “There’s lots of people talking about it. The only one who’s not talking about it is me.”
The secretary of state also remained optimistic that the stalled talks between the United States and North Korea could nudge forward. In the meantime, Pompeo has set a goal as the country’s top diplomat to attract the best and brightest from across the country to join the State Department.
“Wichita … and small towns in Texas, and Alabama, and Mississippi, and Appalachia, and in Idaho and Montana. I want people to come from all around because we need those voices heard here at the State Department,” Pompeo said.
Pompeo came to State after a brief stint as the director of the CIA and three terms in Congress. The 55-year-old native Californian and former businessman made his mother’s home state of Kansas his home around 20 years ago. He’s also an Army veteran who graduated first in his class at West Point and attended Harvard Law School.
Direct, confident, and slightly reserved, Pompeo nevertheless lets his sense of humor crack through at times.
Pompeo discussed the goals President Trump has set for the State Department, the president’s preference for bilateral deals over multilateral deals, and critical issues in China, North Korea, the U.K., and Iran.
Excerpts from the transcript, edited for length and clarity, are below:
Washington Examiner: What is it like to be the top diplomat in the country?
Pompeo: It’s an incredible privilege. It’s also a real burden in that I think every day about the responsibility that the president has given me to deliver on behalf of the American people. At the same time, I have a large organization. I want to make sure I keep them focused on the mission and keep them safe and secure in the places that they are. But we’ve got to get the right outcomes. If we do our job well, we’ll fight fewer wars, keep more of our young people alive, and we’ll get what America needs around the world. That’s the mission the president has largely set on me. So, I see this history, and you see all these great people who came before, and it’s inspiring.
Washington Examiner: When I talk to people about how they view diplomacy (for them), it seems to be one thing in a photo op or speech, but there’s a lot of different moving parts that happen behind the scenes that people are not privy to. Maybe you could explain that dynamic a little bit.
Pompeo: State Department work does have multiple pieces to it. The piece that you see most often is me traveling to meet with my counterparts or foreign leaders around the world. That’s the very public-facing, important element of what the State Department does. But there are 13,000 foreign service officers.
We have embassies in 180-plus countries around the world who are interacting with their counterparts in country delivering passports. … If you want to go travel to a foreign country, you got to run through the State Department, and we have to deliver for you …
We do consular services. If something comes up while you’re traveling, we’re responsible for making sure that we do our best to take care of Americans’ needs overseas. We run the foreign-assistance programs for the United States where we are taking U.S. taxpayer dollars and making a decision that says it’s in America’s interest to spend these resources someplace other than the United States …
Washington Examiner: What keeps you up at night?
Pompeo: … I don’t have any trouble sleeping, personally. But the question goes to one of the things that I worry about for the United States. The first is we have to have a growing, thriving economy here in the United States. It’s imperative for our national security. The State Department’s role in that is multifaceted.
First, if American companies are competing overseas, we want to make sure they have every opportunity to win that business. So, when you look at the president’s trade policies and our efforts to expand markets for people in the United States, the State Department has a big role in that. I’ve got my team out working hard on that. We have hundreds and hundreds of econ officers doing economic work all across the world.
The second piece of that is what I call the security element of it, which is making sure that when we’re over there, we’ve got a way that we know that these nations are respecting our people, taking care of them, so you’ve got to keep the economy going. That’s essential …
We’re out there trying truly to protect American interests in a way that makes these other places better too. It’s not zero-sum for us. … If Colombia benefits from it, that’s great as long as America benefits as well. But it’s not zero-sum. We don’t have to take something away from another country in order for America to be more prosperous or more secure, and I worry sometimes we lose sight of that or that the American people lose sight of that as well.
Washington Examiner: One of the things that I noticed in covering 2016 in the lead-up to that election is that people in the interior of the country felt as though multilateral deals were not to the best benefit of the American people.
Pompeo: It’s certainly been a part of it, and it is really to get these agreements, right? If there’s just one other party, a bilateral relationship, that’s great. You can very effectively have negotiation. There is risk when you enter into a larger, bigger group that you have to sacrifice too much to get the lowest common denominator on board and that Americans give up too much.
The approach President Trump has asked me to take is to focus on getting good outcomes for the American people. Even if it’s a multilateral arrangement …
We’ve been working on South Korea. To get the South Koreans to pay for more of their defense in our relationship with them, we should improve that too.
In every instance, we’ve tried to take the arrangements, not just economic, it’s a security arrangement. To take those arrangements and say, do they work? Some of these are 70 years old now …
Are they still fit for our purposes? There are very few things that after 70 years don’t need a wrench-tighten, a tune-up. Sometimes, they need to just be thrown away, scrapped. And we’ve tried to take a look at each of those things that Americans committed to and say, does it make sense? Oftentimes, when it doesn’t make sense for America, it turns out it doesn’t make sense for other countries as well.
President Trump has been prepared to address them, confront them, say, look, this doesn’t work for us anymore. We’re happy to reconfigure it in a way that does. If so, we’re happy to be a part of it. But … if we can’t get there, then we’re going to step away from it and allow it to go on without America being the loser in the arrangement.
Washington Examiner: China, Hong Kong.
Pompeo: So, at the moment, we’re watching Hong Kongers demand freedom. … It’s really quite something. And [Sunday, there] were 1.7 million people. … There’s only 7.5 million people in Hong Kong. That’s a quarter of their population. That’d be the equivalent of 70 million Americans, 75 million Americans. Just to get the magnitude, that shows the depth of the desire for freedom. As I think the president said [on Sunday], he said, look, it’s important that China gets this right. They made a promise on “one country, two systems.” They need to hold that commitment to “one country, two systems.” We need to do this in a way, the president used the term humane or nonviolent. It’s an imperative that both the protesters behave in nonviolent ways and that China does …
Washington Examiner: Despite all the back and forth between China, when I interviewed [President Trump], he seemed to express a pretty decent relationship with China.
Pompeo: I’ve seen that personally. I’ve been in meetings with him and President Xi [Jinping]. The personal relationship is very, very good. What President Trump walked into when he came into office was a relationship that’s like we described before. It had become very imbalanced over time, and in fact, the arrangements that were in place, they fit a different time. They fit a time when China was truly a developing nation, had very limited military capacity. All of the elements of the relationship had become imbalanced. President Trump said, “Let’s get it right. Let’s make Chinese investment in the United States on the same terms as U.S. investment in China. Let’s make sure that our tariff systems and our barriers to products being sold are parallel and reciprocal.” This isn’t anything that’s against China. It’s about getting the sets of rules the same so that Americans can continue to be prosperous as well.
Washington Examiner: What about control of the South China Sea?
Pompeo: We hope China will honor what President Xi said he would do. Again, this is to the promise. They made a promise to “one country, two systems.” They made a commitment in 2015 that said they wouldn’t militarize the South China Sea. We should hold them to that, and they should recognize international law the same way that we recognize international law. China needs to be held to account to do that too. We’re not asking anything extra from them, only that they play it so there’s a decision about the South China Sea and the legal parameters of whose waters are whose. The Chinese government should honor that. The Chinese will tell me when I meet with them that they want to follow this international system of rule and law. That’s what we need to see them actually do. If they do that, we’ll go compete, and we’ll find places where we work together, and things could be good. If they choose not to do that, it’s not right for the American people.
Washington Examiner: With Iran in the past 24 hours, I think it’s Grace 1, the oil tanker in Gibraltar that’s allegedly heading towards Greece. These types of moments which seem to happen more and more frequently. How, as secretary of state, do you handle them in the moment, and what are your concerns?
Pompeo: Let me just back up just a little bit to one little part. President Trump made clear from the campaign even, certainly from day one, that we were going to make a big departure from how the previous administration addressed the Islamic Republic of Iran. We weren’t going to let them have a nuclear weapon or a path to a nuclear weapon. We weren’t going to let them continue to develop their missile program, and we were going to try to deny them the resources to build out their terror campaign.
What you saw with the Grace 1 is a tactical element of that. You saw a ship that was laden with crude oil that was headed to support the Iranian Quds Force inside of Syria. … It was held up. We attempted to keep it held up. It’s now back on its way. We’re going to continue to do our best to ensure that particular shipment doesn’t get into the hands of terrorists so it can risk American lives or lives of citizens in any other part of the world.
But more broadly than that, and that ship is one example, we put in place a set of sanctions designed to deny the ayatollah the wealth to terrorize the world conventionally or with nuclear weapons, and we’ve been pretty effective. We can see with Hezbollah —
Washington Examiner: Hezbollah. That was my next question.
Pompeo: We can see with the Shia forces in Iraq. We can see that they have fewer dollars. They’re having to make really difficult decisions about whether to spend money on defense or just spend money back home. This is what it was designed for, and we hope they will ultimately conclude that the best thing to do is to rejoin the community of nations, to stop conducting assassination campaigns in Europe, to cease with terror operations supporting Hamas and the PIJ in the Gaza Strip or Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria. We hope they’ll see that the best thing they can do for the Iranian people’s security and prosperity is to stop this terror regime. I don’t know that they will. They’re pretty wedded to it, it’s ideological. It’s not even about logic. It’s deeply ingrained in their revolutionary culture, and we hope that the Iranian people will see a way to get the leadership in Iran to change its behavior.
Washington Examiner: North Korea. You just announced that you’re renewing the ban on use of U.S. passports to North Korea. Is that a sign of where negotiations are, or if they’re stalled?
Pompeo: It’s just an extension of where we’ve been. We renew this, I think it’s annually. We do it in 12-month increments to measure. We concluded that we’ve not made enough progress to relieve that restriction, nor have we made enough progress to relieve the U.N. Security Council resolutions that have put economic restrictions on North Korea either. Look … I was the first senior leader to go. I went when I was CIA director to see Chairman Kim [Jong Un] back on Easter 2018.
[Trump] said, “Mike, this is going to be a long road. It’s going to have steps forward and steps back. But what we need to do is build out a set of understandings that could ultimately permit Chairman Kim to make this decision to denuclearize. The whole world wants it. Let’s go see if we can convince Chairman Kim that he can be secure, that their country can prosper, that things can be better for North Korea, but they got to give up their nuclear weapons to do so and we have to do so in a way that is verifiable.”
We’ve been at the table with them intermittently since then trying to deliver that. The president has come after Chairman Kim three times. Sometimes, I know these things are characterized as failures, but the truth is each time, I think the two leaders have developed deeper understandings of how it is we might achieve this. I still remain hopeful that Chairman Kim is committed to this and sees a path that allows him to execute on this. But in the event that he doesn’t, we’ll continue to keep on the sanctions that are the toughest in all of history and continue to work towards convincing Chairman Kim and the North Korean leaders that the right thing to do is for them to denuclearize. I think he sees it. I think we all need to continue to work at this so that he can find the path to actually execute the commitment that he made in Singapore in June.
Washington Examiner: Why do you think they’re viewed as failures? There were people outside of D.C. who didn’t think they would see that in their lifetime, and not in a negative way.
Pompeo: I agree. I would argue that most Americans think that way, but here inside the Beltway, there’s a long history of establishment policies, and this is the way you do things.
I remember when the president ultimately decided the first time that he would meet with Chairman Kim. We knew full well the Washington establishment would say, “Oh, you’re giving up too much. You’re meeting with him. You’re giving him, you haven’t gotten anything. Why would you meet with him?”
The answer is you meet with him because he’s the decision-maker. He can make this decision to take this risk of nuclear war with the Genesis or nuclear proliferation where they would sell a weapons system is very real.
To take that through some doubt is worth taking some risk.
President Trump has been willing to do that, to expend his time and energy on this problem set. So have I. I couldn’t tell you why they see it this way, but you —
Washington Examiner: Do you think it’s because this is a company town, right? And for Republicans and Democrats, it’s very hard to see their status quo kind of blown up a little bit, and things done differently. Do you think that’s a little bit part of it?
Pompeo: I do. I’ve seen this in many things that President Trump and I have been working on. I’ve been in this town for almost 10 years now. This [is] the status quo place, and disrupting the status quo —
Washington Examiner: On both sides.
Pompeo: Oh, there is this bipartisan demand for continuing to do things the way you’ve been doing them. So when we go take different steps, when we move on Iran, right? This is something I’ve been advocating for as a member of Congress, but which President Trump permitted us to go do.
When we take this different approach of North Korea, when we are very direct with our NATO partners. When we go work on a problem set in Venezuela that had been ignored for years. When we do those things, yes, you get critiqued from both sides, at least in part because it’s disruptive. My whole theory and a good part of my life was, find places where you can identify opportunities and be prepared to accept the risk, personal and professional, of being disruptive.
Washington Examiner: I remember in the early parts of covering the election in 2015, and the most common profession of people that liked Trump were engineers. And I couldn’t figure that out. So I asked my dad, who’s an engineer, “Why is it engineers like him so much?” He goes, “I get that. We just like to blow things up and start all over again.” What is it about when you were growing up or what has formed you that you fit right into this? Were you an engineer?
Pompeo: I am. I’m a mechanical engineer. My major’s in engineering management, but I learned it through studying mechanical engineering. That is my background from undergraduate life.
[Your dad] is right. What we like to do is we like to see if we can’t engineer better outcomes and we’re prepared to get a clean sheet to think about things anew, to see if we can’t get to that better outcome. I think that’s certainly part of it.
Now, you don’t blow things up for the sake of it. You do it when you’ve done the work, you’ve done the analysis, you conclude I think there’s a better way to go deliver on this. I can measure the risk associated with it and then move out, and boy goodness, others can say their piece.
Washington Examiner: Influencers for you in Washington: President Trump, Sen. Tom Cotton?
Pompeo: Oh, goodness. I’ve worked for the president now for 2 1/2 years. It is undoubtedly the case that I’ve spent enough time with him that I hope we’ve influenced each other a little bit.
I hope I’ve been able to make the case for some things. If not, I’m failing as an adviser to him.
But he has very deep views on how these things ought to move, and I’ve certainly seen I’ve taken on board a lot of the ideas that he has. He’s opened the aperture for lots of us, I think. I think all across America.
Sen. Cotton and I became fast friends. … We both had served in the military, we’d both gone to law school, so we had a lot in common in terms of our personal histories, but we also shared an overlapping mindset.
Washington Examiner: How would you describe your relationship with the president?
Pompeo: I work for him. I think that’s the most important thing. Everybody on the president’s team always understands that the Constitution is very clear. I have an obligation to share with him my thoughts, my wisdom, my best advice. Then, as he makes his decision informed by lots of different elements, things he sees on the outside of government, things inside, he says, “Mike, this is diplomatically what I want you to achieve.” … My mission is very, very clear. It’s to get the outcome he’s shooting for. And if we head down a path and it’s not working, to go back to him and say, “Hey, I think if we adjust this way, we can do it better.” But then, he’s in charge.
The most important thing, and I see people forget this from time to time too, my most important mission is that I work for him. … A fundamental piece of what I do is deliver on the things he wants. I’m always asked, well, what if he asked you to do something illegal? It’s just never happened. But in the event, that’s one way that you quit, right? Which is also fine, but just that’s always a hypothetical that people raise.
It’s unserious, if you asked me about it. The truth is you work, you go to solve problems, you identify the direction for the most part, the president just says, “Here’s the outcome I’m looking for. Go figure out how to get it done. It’s your problem, Pompeo.” Right? “Figure it out.” And my mission is to go get the outcomes that the president is directing. Beyond that, I talk to the president nearly every day, sometimes more than once a day.
We don’t always see everything exactly the same way. It would be odd if we did.
Washington Examiner: Your thoughts on Brexit?
Pompeo: Today, we’re prohibited from a trade agreement with them because they’re inside of the EU, and our team’s going to work diligently to get a free trade agreement in place so that we can continue the trade flows between our two countries should they make the decision to leave.
The prime minister said he’s leaving on October 31st, so we’re now 70 days away, 71 days away from that, and we want to make sure that American businesses that are operating inside the United Kingdom and those that are trading with the United Kingdom have a seamless transition. I think we can do that.
Washington Examiner: Is there any one goal that you would really want to do before your service is over?
Pompeo: Yeah, I want to make the State Department a place where people want to come serve. I always think when you’re responsible for a team that one of the things you can do that outlasts your time and service is that you can create a culture and an environment where the best and brightest from all across America want to come be [a] part of that team, and I hope I can do that here and create, instead of training programs and the esprit de corps, we kind of talk about swagger here. We’re bringing this confidence to the State Department here in America that says, “No, you’re a force for good around the world. We should be proud of being America.” We should, when we’re around the world, talk about the greatness of our country because it’s unique in all of history, and we shouldn’t be embarrassed to speak that way. It’s important. Other countries see it, and I want to create a place where young people from all across the country, not just from Boston and Washington and —
Washington Examiner: You want people from Youngstown, Pittsburgh?
Pompeo: And Wichita. Yes, and small towns in Texas, and Alabama, and Mississippi, and Appalachia, and in Idaho and Montana. I want people to come from all around because we need those voices heard here at the State Department as well.
Washington Examiner: … and running for Senate?
Pompeo: I am going to stay here. I’ve talked about this. I’m focused on what I’m doing right now. You can go read about it. There’s lots of people talking about it. The only one who’s not talking about it —
Washington Examiner: Is you?
Pompeo: Is me. Precisely.
