As President Trump’s tenure comes to an ignominious end, the media have wrongly attempted to rewrite the history of his administration as a whole through the lens of recent events.
In the decades leading up to Trump’s presidency, the foreign policy establishment had gotten nearly every conflict fatally wrong. Now, that same establishment’s mouthpieces in the press have attempted to brand perhaps the most successful aspect of Trump’s mixed presidency as its least successful.
The New York Times news section has an entire piece detailing why “some analysts” say that Mike Pompeo has been “the worst secretary of state in American history.” Slate doesn’t even pretend to have a veneer of objectivity, headlining its news piece on the nation’s outgoing chief diplomat the “Worst Secretary of State Ever,” declaring him to be even worse when compared to his predecessors than Trump was.
By any objective measure, Pompeo was not the worst secretary of state. If you compare him to his modern competitors, he’s surely one of the finer ones.
Those sharing the opinion of Slate and the New York Times probably don’t include Israel, Kosovo, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, Oman, or Serbia. The terrorists running Iran, the genocidal Chinese Communist Party, and the illegitimate communist government controlling Venezuela surely do agree that Pompeo is the worst. The New York Times, of course, admits this:
That was especially the case for China, as Mr. Pompeo emerged as the administration’s most vocal critic of Beijing. He took every opportunity to highlight China’s human rights abuses of Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities and, as a parting shot, he is now considering whether to declare them acts of genocide.
He has also led global condemnation of Beijing’s expansionist ambitions and oppression in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the South China Sea. Other nations, however, have refused to follow the United States’ withdrawal from the World Health Organization, which stripped funding from the U.N. agency during the coronavirus pandemic, which Mr. Pompeo insisted on calling the “Wuhan virus,” again echoing Mr. Trump.
In dealing with Venezuela, Mr. Pompeo marshaled about 60 countries against Mr. Maduro after disputed elections and battered the government in Caracas with sanctions. But Mr. Maduro has remained in power.
Yes, and?
For decades, the foreign policy establishment operated under the assumption that appeasing the Palestinians was a prerequisite to achieving peace in the Middle East. John Kerry, the author of the disastrous deal to appease the other bully of the Middle East, Iran, said as much.
One Arab country recognized Israel for every time John Kerry said “no” it won’t happen.
(h/t @MortChristenson) pic.twitter.com/RsoMBLnmho
— Lahav Harkov (@LahavHarkov) December 10, 2020
He was, of course, wrong.
Similarly, the foreign policy establishment has followed war criminal Henry Kissinger’s insistence that liberalizing trade and relations with China would liberalize that nation internally. Pompeo and the Trump administration had the stomach to buck decades of appeasement. While Trump’s trade division embarked on an ill-advised trade war in some hopes of a deal that never materialized into something meaningful, the administration’s foreign policy wing (guided by much wiser minds) succeeded in turning the tide against China, notably driving Huawei out of global 5G development, holding Beijing’s feet to the fire over the true origins of the novel coronavirus, and now taking the monumental step of branding the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of Uigurs in Xinjiang a genocide.
Instead of relying on illegal drone strikes and new boots on the ground, the State Department under Pompeo relied largely on sanctions and, especially in the Middle East, diplomacy. Twenty-one years after Bill Clinton bombed Belgrade, Kosovo and Serbia now have normalized economic relations after centuries of constant sparring. Mere years after Kerry’s lies about the Middle East, the region has consolidated, with Israel and Saudi Arabia and against Iran. This outcome thoroughly discredits not just the Obama doctrine but the bipartisan consensus that deceived the West for so many decades.
History may not remember Trump well. Given his staggering attempt to overturn the election, it probably shouldn’t. But acknowledging his vast personal failures does not require smearing every public servant who tried to keep the White House from following its boss’s every caprice.
Pompeo served his country first. Besides, one need only compare him to Kerry to realize that he cannot possibly be the worst secretary of state in our nation’s history.
