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WASHINGTON – By choosing CIA Director Mike Pompeo to succeed Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, President Donald Trump has picked a hard-edged conservative who shares virtually all of his views on foreign policy.
On Tuesday, Trump announced via Twitter he had fired Tillerson after a year of fraught relations, and chose the Central Intelligence Agency director as Tillerson’s successor.
Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2018
Pompeo, a former three-term Republican House member from Kansas, was aligned with the party’s far-right Tea Party faction while in Congress.
As CIA director, he developed a rapport with Trump by delivering a daily intelligence briefing to Trump in the Oval Office. A personal bond isn’t all that Pompeo shares with the president, however. On key issues of foreign policy, he and the president see eye to eye.
So, just where does he stand on important national security issues that he’ll confront if confirmed by the Senate to be the nation’s seventieth secretary of state?
North Korea
“It would be a great thing to denuclearize the [Korean] peninsula, to get those weapons off of that, but the thing that is most dangerous about it is the character who holds the control over them today,”
Pompeo defended Trump’s decision to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this spring, telling Fox News Sunday that the president “isn’t doing this for theater” but was “going to solve a problem.”
Pompeo has said that the administration is “focused like a laser” on achieving a diplomatic solution to North Korea’s growing nuclear weapons threat to the U.S. and its allies before pursuing other avenues like a pre-emptive military strike.
In an appearance at the American Enterprise Institute in January, he said the CIA is working on signaling to North Korea that his preference is a peaceful, diplomatic solution.
“We’re taking the real-world actions that we think will make unmistakable to Kim Jong Un that we are intent on denuclearization,” said Pompeo.
Last July before a crowd at the Aspen Security Forum, Pompeo hinted that he is in favor of a regime change in North Korea, something Tillerson said the U.S. was opposed to. Pompeo has described Kim as a “rational actor,” in an apparent divergence from Trump who has described the North Korean leader as “little rocket man.”
“It would be a great thing to denuclearize the [Korean] peninsula, to get those weapons off of that, but the thing that is most dangerous about it is the character who holds the control over them today,” said Pompeo. “Separate capacity and someone who might well have intent and break those two apart.”
Iran
“For unlike ISIS and its mirage of a caliphate, Iran is a powerful nation-state that remains the world’s largest state-sponsor of terrorism.”
Like Trump, Pompeo has been a fierce critic of the Iran nuclear deal that was negotiated by the Obama administration, Iran and and a half dozen other countries. Trump repeatedly denounced the deal throughout the 2016 campaign and vowed to pull out of it. During the presidential transition as Trump was figuring out his cabinet, Pompeo took to Twitter to criticize the deal, almost auditioning for a job in the administration.
“I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism,” Pompeo tweeted in November of 2016.
As part of the deal, Iran agreed to freeze its program to develop nuclear weapons in return for the U.S. and other countries lifting economic sanctions against Iranian banks and economic interests.
In an October 2017 speech at the University of Texas, Pompeo went so far as to compare Iran to ISIS, the Islamic terrorist group that unsuccessfully sought to create a caliphate.
“For unlike ISIS and its mirage of a caliphate, Iran is a powerful nation-state that remains the world’s largest state-sponsor of terrorism,” he said. “The Islamic Republic is Iran’s version of what the caliphate ought to look like under the control of an Ayatollah and his praetorian guard.”
Russia
“This administration is deeply aware that we need to continue to push back against the Russians everywhere we find them.”
As CIA director, Pompeo has taken a hard line against Russia and firmly believes Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election in an effort to influence its outcome. During an appearance before the American Enterprise Institute, he said that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “bent on returning the former Soviet Union to its greatness and glory.”
In defending the administration’s general approach, Pompeo said “This administration is deeply aware that we need to continue to push back against the Russians everywhere we find them.”
However, Pompeo has, like Trump, downplayed the notion that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was designed to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton. Last October, Pompeo falsely said the intelligence community’s assessment was that any Russian meddling that took place did not have an impact on the outcome of the election.
In January, a report from the Director of National Intelligence contradicted Pompeo’s claim. “We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election,” the report states.
Climate Change
“There are scientists who think lots of different things about climate change. There’s some who think we’re warming, there’s some who think that the last 16 years have shown a pretty stable climate environment.”
As nearly 200 countries came together in 2016 to sign the Paris climate accord, Pompeo blasted the treaty as a part of a “radical climate change agenda.” The CIA director shares some of Trump’s skepticism of climate change.
During his confirmation hearing to become the director of the CIA, Pompeo tried to avoid the issue of climate change altogether. “I frankly as the Director of CIA would prefer today not to get into the details of climate debate and science,” he said.
In 2013, during an appearance on C-SPAN, Pompeo was also skeptical about the scientific conclusions regarding climate change.
“I think the science needs to continue to develop,” he said. “I’m happy to continue to look at it,” he said. “There are scientists who think lots of different things about climate change. There’s some who think we’re warming, there’s some who think that the last 16 years have shown a pretty stable climate environment.”