A fossa walks into The Lemur’s habitat. A slinky, craven little fellow, prowling around, jabbing and jousting. Snarling. Trying to prove he’s the Big Cat…
That’s more or less what I saw when Mike Pompeo showed up at Duke this Monday: the wily, wicked-smart former Secretary of State is prowling around the forest floor of American politics, not quite in the Trump camp and yet, as became abundantly clear from his remarks at Duke, not quite out of it.
Pompeo was the headliner of the Phillips Lecture, hosted by Duke’s Program in American Grand Strategy, a marquee event held every spring in Page Auditorium, which brings in the biggest-ticket, highest-profile foreign policy speaker of the semester. Mike Pompeo, of course, fits that billing. He served as both CIA Director and Secretary of State in Trump’s first term. And although Pompeo was one of the few Cabinet officials who found stable employment in Trump’s inner circle for all four years of the first term (albeit in two different jobs), he has not been invited back for the second journey on the Trump merry-go-round. To wit, his Monday nights are free. Pompeo features on a list of first administration stalwarts who find themselves on the outside looking in this time, not apparently because of political opposition to the current and former president. Pompeo—like former Trade Representative and cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs tariff man Robert Lighthizer and UN ambassador and half-hearted Trump primary challenger Nikki Haley—is no Bill Barr or John Bolton. It’s hard to really put a finger on why he is not back in business for the Comeback Kids squad that is Trump’s second Cabinet: perhaps it was Pompeo’s brief consideration of a 2024 presidential run that irked Trump. Or perhaps the four-year interval in between terms has Trump wanting to start anew with fresh blood. Neither of these reasons feels entirely convincing. And most perplexingly of all, Pompeo’s remarks at Duke made clear that he still thinks very highly of the former President, or at least they reveal that he has elected to continue speaking very highly of him in public.
Pompeo doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo that Trump is through with him: it’s almost as if he’s angling for a spot in the third term (brrr…). Despite Pompeo’s unflagging loyalty to Trump throughout the first term, and the initial role he played in supporting Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election (too few people remember Pompeo’s “smooth transition to the second Trump administration” comments), Trump kicked him out of the God Squad in humiliating fashion. In a gratuitous Truth Social post after his November election victory, Trump lumped Pompeo in with erstwhile rival Nikki Haley, announcing that neither former Cabinet member would be invited back for the sequel. More recently, he pulled Pompeo’s security detail, despite the fact that Iran has a hit out on the former Secretary of State for his role in the assassination of IRGC General Qasem Soleimani. Pompeo was stunningly blasé about these decisions in the talk. He stressed repeatedly that he served at the pleasure of the president in his first term; he recounted almost cheerily how he expected to be fired by Tweet any day that he was Secretary of State (he and his wife, Susan, would check Twitter in the morning before he set off to Foggy Bottom); and he tried out some vague equivalence about Biden allegedly “considering” to pull security details when he came into office. Pompeo’s facts are all gooey, but more shocking is his apparent comfort with this magnitude of humiliation. It’s like Pompeo is starting his first day of fourth grade, and still trying to be friends with that bully who made third grade such a living hell.
And yet the tone Pompeo adopted during the moderated conversation with Duke Political Science Professor and Director of AGS, Peter Feaver was nothing other than obsequious. Much of the conversation focused on decisions Pompeo made as CIA Director (2017-2018), and as Secretary of State (2018-2021) during the first term. After acknowledging his team’s failure on ballistic missile negotiations with North Korea (for the record, Pompeo says it was a mistake to hold the second summit in Hanoi), Pompeo ran through the list of his policy accomplishments. He talked up the Abraham Accords—the normalization-of-relations agreement orchestrated by the Trump administration between Israel and four geopolitically ancillary Islamic states in North Africa and the Gulf (Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the UAE). He touted his religious liberty initiatives at the State Department, including the religious liberty conference he organized at Foggy Bottom, which he said was the “largest human rights conference” ever held by the United States (Pompeo is a devout evangelical Christian). He referenced his condemnation of CCP persecution of the Uyghurs, and his advancement of coherent tough-on-China policies starting in 2018, something for which he does deserve credit.
And he belligerently defended each and every one of these positions from able questioning by Feaver. Pompeo argued that the skeptical stance of previous administrations towards normalization deals between Israel and other Middle Eastern nations was proven “dead wrong.” Of course, that former skepticism was reinforced by the belief that normalization was meaningless toward broader regional security without action on the “Palestinian issue.” Pompeo refuses to entertain a universe in which the Abraham Accords are anything other than an unmitigated success, instead blaming Oct. 7 on Iranian puppet theater, rather than the more obvious cause: the failure of Israel’s “buying quiet” policy towards Gaza and related hubris-coded intelligence failures. The Abraham Accords seemed like a good idea at the time, and putting them together required impressive effort on the part of Pompeo and others, but they did not make the Middle East safer (at one point in the talk, Pompeo referred to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria—I’ve got to say, he’s got some courage to pull that phrase out on a college campus).
And despite accepting personal responsibility for the stalled North Korea negotiations (he called it his “greatest failure”), Pompeo nevertheless lauded Trump ad nauseum for the purported brilliance of his unorthodox approach to one-on-one interactions with Chairman Kim. This was a theme in the talk. When Feaver asked him about Trump’s recent foreign policy real estate plans, including a threatened purchase of Greenland and a Las Vegas Strip-ification of the Gaza Strip, Pompeo seemed overjoyed by both. As to whether this was a part of a “coherent” vision of a new American role in the world—with more casinos for Emirati expats and fewer vaccines for African children—Pompeo did not seem much to care. Trump is a “deal guy,” he said, and he praised the president’s case-by-case approach to given “problem sets.” He did not seem to see the irony of saying this in front of a poster touting the virtues of “grand strategy.”
And that, more or less, is Mike Pompeo’s problem in a nutshell. He is smart enough to appreciate the importance of strategy, serious thought, and comprehensive analysis in foreign policy decision-making. But he has tied his career—and more importantly, his legacy—to someone who fundamentally disagrees. I didn’t expect Pompeo to disown his policy positions—he’s still a staunch conservative and an ardent realist. Nor did I expect him to be warm and fuzzy about Biden administration departures from decisions he was involved in (and in many cases, he is very right to criticize the shortcomings and misguided undertakings of his successors, especially in Afghanistan). But I did not expect this level of kowtowing.
Running through the talk was a peculiar tone of fealty towards a President who has treated Pompeo very poorly. Pompeo seems to believe that the true measure of his legacy will be his record at the State Department and at the CIA, and that record is inextricably tied with Trump’s legacy as a statesman. So there is some logic, therefore, to Pompeo’s decision to portray Trump as the 21st century’s most original and brilliant politician—Bismarck, Churchill, and Machiavelli rolled into one—which is the image of Trump that emerged from the talk. For such a smart man, Pompeo is flailing around in a bog of obvious delusion: he seems convinced that he will be best remembered for engineering the Abraham Accords, for being tough on China, for taking out Soleimani and for making a principled effort to get out of Afghanistan (unconnected to the disastrous Biden withdrawal), not his dogged loyalty to a budding authoritarian.
Mike Pompeo is no pushover: he’s a wily creature, a wicked-smart four-term congressman, Harvard Law man, and first-in-his-class graduate of West Point. He has long been comfortable in a variety of settings—he talked up his rapid acclimation to the job of CIA Director, and seemed awfully proud of his swift and successful Congress-to-Cabinet pivot. He’s frequently the smartest man in the room, and clearly thought he could pull a fast one on the Duke audience tonight (sparring ably with Professor Feaver, who is no pushover himself), but everyone I spoke with saw through the ruse. “That’s an hour I’ll never get back,” one student said. “What the hell was that?” wondered another. This genuflecting Grima Wormtongue that Pompeo has become is a far cry from the tough-guy, adult-in-the-room that observers remember from the first term. Pompeo was one of the best, most serious Cabinet members from 2017-2021. He has ample energy to apply towards noble political goals. The tragedy of Mike Pompeo is that that energy was wasted on propping up a weak and confused president, someone who ascended to the office by luck and chaos, not skill and planning. I’m reminded of what William Ewart Gladstone, untiring Victorian statesman par excellence, said to Robert Lowe, a Liberal of astounding intellectual ability who nevertheless opposed expanding the franchise (for overly complicated political reasons), during a memorable Commons debate in 1866:
“Will my right hon. Friend permit me to apply to him the story which is told of the mother of the regent Duke of Orleans, Elizabeth the Princess Palatine of Bavaria. She said of her son, what I will venture to apply to my right hon. Friend. Her story was, that at his birth the fairies were invited to attend. Each came, and each brought the infant the gift of a talent. But in sending the invitations one fairy had unhappily been forgotten. She came unasked and said for her revenge, “Yes, he shall have all the talents except one, that of knowing how and for what end to apply them.”
Mike Pompeo never got that fairy’s gift. The legacy of his career, like that of the current Secretary of State Marco Rubio (and all the smart and sensible people still trying to put a spin on insanity in Trump world), will ultimately be defined by this mis-applied energy. His remarkable and presumably exhausting efforts—from his military service to legal career to his time in Congress and his Cabinet jobs—were negated and nullified by the basic moral miscalculation of staying loyal to Donald Trump, a man much dumber and sillier than he. Pompeo doesn’t seem to get that that the talent of “knowing how and for what to end apply” one’s energies is what politics is all about. Gladstone understood that. Robert Lowe didn’t. And Gladstone is remembered as the greatest statesman of his century, while Robert Lowe is best remembered, perhaps, as that Google search which prompts the question: “did you mean Rob Lowe?” And that, Secretary Pompeo, is how legacy really works.
By Zachary Partnoy
