We hope the Senate will approve CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s appointment as secretary of state.
Then, the hard work will begin.
Pompeo will need to sell the idea of diplomacy to a president who often seems to disdain it, and he will need to impose President Trump’s “America First” mentality on a career diplomatic corps that finds the notion distasteful.
Diplomacy and America First can go together. We think Pompeo — both a tough guy who has Trump’s respect and a smart guy who understands how hard and how crucial geopolitics can be — is the man who can arrange this marriage.
Under the two previous secretaries of state, Rex Tillerson and John Kerry, that leadership was absent, and Foggy Bottom drifted into consequential irrelevance.
Under Kerry, U.S. diplomats were constricted to delivering messages from President Barack Obama’s White House. Our diplomats were mere cogs, dispatched to execute Obama’s ideologically driven agenda. And we saw the outcome: diplomatic disasters such as the 2013 Syrian chemical weapons deal, an Iran nuclear agreement full of loopholes, and China’s usurpation of American influence across the Indo-Pacific.
Under Tillerson, U.S. diplomats found themselves adrift without direction. Refusing to nominate officials to fill senior-level vacancies and ignoring the expertise of career officials, Tillerson depleted morale and diluted the State Department’s influence in the White House.
In that context, we welcome Pompeo’s pledge at his Senate confirmation hearings this week to rapidly fill vacant positions and energize American diplomacy.
But what should that energy entail?
We suggest three priorities.
First, Pompeo should empower the most talented managers and informed intellects at the department’s top ranks, rather than simply surrounding himself with like-minded aides. Pompeo’s office floor must not become an ideologically homogeneous citadel.
Pompeo must also enable foreign service officers to take more risks abroad. At present, department concerns over kidnap or attack mean that too many officers are restricted from doing their jobs effectively. The legacy of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens is not that he died unprotected, but that he died taking risks to deliver for his nation.
Second, Pompeo can’t simply be a conduit of Trump’s wishes to the diplomats and to the world. He needs to carry information both ways. That is, he needs to listen not only to the president, but also to the State Department officials on the ground and to his foreign counterparts. Trump’s brash style often involves us telling the rest of the world what the deal will be. U.S. assertiveness is appropriate and good, but smart foreign policy involves plenty of listening.
Notably, on controversial matters such as the Iran nuclear agreement, Pompeo will have to work with European counterparts who strongly disagree with his views. It doesn’t advance our interests to alienate Europe through refusal to listen, and occasionally accommodate.
Third, Pompeo should work with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to ensure unity of effort between diplomacy and military power. This demand will be especially important in grappling with the challenges posed by China, Russia, and North Korea. Yet, it will also broadcast a greater sense of American strength and purpose to the world.
Ultimately, as he enters the State Department’s headquarters on his first day, Pompeo must remind himself that his role has changed. The former military officer, congressman, and intelligence chief will no longer be the master of conservative ideology, hard power, and shadow wars.
Instead, he will be America’s face, voice, and leader in the world and its integral means of promoting global peace, prosperity, stability, and freedom.
