Pompeo Trip to Offer Awkward Moments Amid Election Transition
Pompeo Trip to Offer Awkward Moments Amid Election Transition
(Bloomberg) -- Secretary of State Michael Pompeo embarked on a seven-nation tour that will put his counterparts in an uncomfortable position, as he presses for cooperation on Trump administration foreign policy priorities that Joe Biden is likely to abandon when he takes office.
The 10-day trip to Europe and the Middle East is made even more awkward by Pompeo’s refusal, like President Donald Trump, to recognize Biden’s victory in the Nov. 3 election. Pompeo has even spoken, perhaps in jest, about preparing for a second Trump term when the president’s current term expires at noon on Jan. 20.
After departing Washington late on Friday, Pompeo’s trip will take him to France, Turkey, Georgia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Almost all of the officials Pompeo will meet -- including French President Emmanuel Macron, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman -- have congratulated Biden on his victory and pledged to work with his administration, something Trump’s team has so far refused to do.
Complicating matters even more is that those leaders can expect a very different approach once Biden is in office. Trump reversed many of President Barack Obama’s initiatives on issues such as Iran and climate change. Biden, in turn, is expected to begin unwinding Trump’s efforts, as well as his tight embrace of leaders criticized as authoritarian.
A big part of Pompeo’s trip appears to be aimed at putting in place policies that will be difficult for Biden to undo. That’s especially the case on Iran, where the Trump administration has imposed a web of sanctions designed to curb the country’s nuclear program and punish it for ties to terrorist groups.
While those efforts have largely cut off Iran’s oil exports and damaged its economy, it hasn’t dislodged President Hassan Rouhani’s government or forced it back to the negotiating table.
A related objective will be to make it harder for Biden to go back into the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that Trump abandoned in 2018.
The trip may also serve a longer-term purpose for Pompeo, who has made little secret of harboring further political ambitions and may seek to run for president in 2024. His stop in Israel will include visits to the Golan Heights and Israeli settlements in the West Bank, something no past secretary has done for fear of antagonizing the Palestinians.
Pompeo, like Trump, has made championing Israel a central theme of his tenure. He courted controversy during his most recent stop in Israel in August, when he recorded a speech to the Republican National Convention from a Jerusalem rooftop.
“There’s no policy they can put in place with 68 days remaining that wouldn’t be easily overturned, and my guess is that Secretary Pompeo wants one last opportunity to make the case to President Trump and potential voters in 2024 for the fabulous achievements of the Trump administration,” said Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
“He’s going to talk about how Europeans contributed more toward NATO’s defense during Trump’s tenure and relations have never been better with Israel,” she added.
A senior administration official, briefing reporters Friday on customary condition of anonymity, denied that was the strategy. The official said the U.S. was pressing ahead with its “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran.
Just as Pompeo will seek to make his priorities more permanent, foreign leaders may try to extract concessions that will outlast Trump. That will probably include the Saudi leader, who can expect far more skepticism from a Biden administration than from Trump, who pointedly made the kingdom his first overseas destination as president in 2017.
Another leader with immediate priorities is Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who faces possible sanctions for buying Russia’s S-400 missile defense system and still wants the U.S. not to punish Halkbank, the Turkish bank convicted in a sanctions-evasion scheme. But Pompeo isn’t meeting Erdogan or other Turkish leaders on his visit. U.S. officials said that’s because of scheduling conflicts and because Pompeo’s focus is on religious issues.
Still, the optics of Pompeo visiting Turkey, an important NATO ally, without meeting any of its leaders, are hard to ignore. Yet Erdogan is already looking ahead to the Biden administration, said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“Erdogan is getting ready for a charm offensive toward President-Elect Biden,” Cagaptay said. “He’ll become whatever Biden wants him to be. He’s getting ready for that pivot.”
Pompeo has bristled at the notion that foreign leaders may already be looking past him to his successor as secretary. On Fox News earlier this week, he was asked what he thought about all the congratulatory calls and tweets.
“If they’re just saying ‘hi,’ I suppose that’s not too terribly difficult,” Pompeo told Fox anchor Bret Baier. “But make no mistake about it: We have one president, one secretary of state, one national security team at a time. It’s appropriate that it be that way.”
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