Hani Mohammed/AP Photo
The deadliest emergency will be in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been waging a brutal war.
The craziest thing Mike Pompeo did this past week wasn’t even touting links between Al-Qaeda and Iran.
As President Donald Trump rages his way out the door, his sabotage-minded secretary of state has worked hard to ensure that Biden’s foreign-policy options will be limited long after Trump is gone. Among the fires Pompeo set during a hectic week: enraging China, choking diplomacy with Cuba, and enacting policies that will escalate the already dire famine in war-torn Yemen.
For Biden, the immediate priority of piloting the nation through a COVID-19 recovery was always going to take precedence over his foreign-policy pledges. During the presidential debates, he laid out a formidable list of action items globally, promising to repair the partnerships that Trump savaged, re-prioritize the climate crisis, and replace Trump’s militaristic policies with a much-needed battery of diplomacy. But before Biden’s diplomats can swing into action, they’ll now have to diffuse, as best they can, the ticking time bombs that Pompeo is setting on his way out. “The first 100 days are going to be pretty wild,” Rachel Rizzo of the Truman National Security Project told me. “There’s just going to be a lot of clean up.”
Pompeo began by throwing away decades of established diplomatic protocol, hastily upgrading relations with Taiwan. The U.S. had avoided officially recognizing the country in order to maintain a complex equilibrium with China. The only reason Pompeo abruptly ended America’s “One China” policy was to force Biden to have to walk it back upon assuming office. Now, no matter what the next administration says or does, it will appear weak, either by kowtowing to China or caving to Trump policy. Then Pompeo aggravated China even further by hitting it with new sanctions aimed at state-run companies and officials operating in the South China Sea.
Even tough-on-China Republicans found the moves to be foolish. “Why are we doing this in the last five days?” a former senior Trump White House official told me. “We could inadvertently get into a conflict.”
These escalations are just the latest in the smoldering pile of crises that form Pompeo’s legacy.
Even worse for Biden, Pompeo has sabotaged any hope of repairing our relationship with Cuba. On Monday, the State Department designated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, the fourth country on a list that only includes Iran, North Korea and Syria. It’s the final blow of Pompeo’s array of attacks on the tenuous diplomatic progress that Barack Obama achieved in Latin America. Obama had to appeal to Congress to remove Cuba from the terror list in 2015, and now if Biden wants to do the same, he’ll have to take the political hit again, just to get back to where things stood six years ago. The optics will be bad either way. Biden will have to provoke Cuban-Americans early in his term to return to a policy that most Americans want, or give up a decade of progress to appease the right wing.
The deadliest emergency, however, will be in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been waging a brutal war against a rebel group known as the Houthis. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has doubled down on his much-criticized friendship with these autocratic powers. They’ve rushed $23 billion of advanced fighter jets and drones to the Emirates and $290 million of Boeing-made bombs to Saudi Arabia. (Pompeo was already under investigation for weaseling through an $8 billion weapons sale to the Saudis, in defiance of Congress.)
While Pompeo is fast-tracking another sweetheart arms deal, he’s also deepening the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. On Monday, the State Department designated Yemen’s Houthis as a foreign-terror group as a favor to the Saudis. Given that the Houthis effectively run the country, humanitarian groups will now find it impossible to get civilians the aid they so desperately need; more than half of Yemenis will go hungry this year.
Rob Malley, the head of the International Crisis Group, is appalled by all of Pompeo’s recent mischief, Yemen most of all. “The most pressing, critical issue is the Yemen decision because of its immediate, catastrophic humanitarian implications and its costly diplomatic repercussions,” he told me.
Finally, there was Pompeo’s speech on Tuesday, where he peddled “The Iran–Al-Qaeda Axis.” Former intelligence officials might have dismissed this as a joke, except that Pompeo’s language suggested that the Trump administration was eager to order a lame-duck strike on Iran.
These escalations are just the latest in the smoldering pile of crises that form Pompeo’s legacy. He proudly trashed multilateral diplomacy by exiting the Paris Climate Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. He helped Trump strangle and demean NATO. He emboldened Arab autocrats through pacts with Israel that were more arms deals than peace deals. In November, he officially redefined human-rights groups critical of Israel as anti-Semitic, another policy that will be nearly impossible politically for Biden to roll back. Little wonder that Israeli settlers have named a wine after Pompeo.
Malley, a former senior Obama official, foresees the Biden team running into what he calls an “inbox problem.” There are simply too many crises that require a response. And while undoing these knots may be technically feasible, each one is more politically thorny than the last, by design.
The Democrats’ toughest challenge won’t be reversing Pompeo’s vandalism, but avoiding all of the political traps he’s laid. Democrats too often talk about Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East on their opponents’ terms. They so frequently dilute their own agenda trying to act more hawkish than Republicans. But Biden can’t risk seeming defensive. Facing so many emergencies, the new president must conjure the almost mythical Biden from campaign ads who transcends party to rescue the country.
Biden’s team must find ways to address the climate crisis, get arms and nukes under control, and do everything possible to end the Yemen war. A source familiar with the transition’s internal dynamics told me that Pompeo’s actions, culminating a term of destruction, are motivated by nothing more than domestic politics. Biden is preparing to undo them from Day One.
Biden’s Secretary of State Tony Blinken will also have to repair a tattered State Department. During the first set of impeachment hearings last winter, Blinken said, “President Trump has weaponized the State Department in service of his reelection … by putting his foreign policy at the service of his own politics and personal ambition.”
Pompeo has carried this on in his waning days. He used tax dollars to politick with fancy donors in the vaunted secretary’s ballroom, including a maskless, indoor Christmas party. His wife treated aides as hired help, forcing them to fetch holiday gifts and do airport pick-ups. When an inspector general began investigating these improper acts, Pompeo fired him. He would rather kibitz with far-right talk show hosts like Ben Shapiro than engage journalists, as we saw recently when he had a Voice of America correspondent reassigned for trying to pose a question to him. He uses his official government Twitter feed to share Bible quotes (#SundayScripture).
Pompeo followed his boss’s lead in refusing to recognize Biden as the winner in November, and instead teased a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” On January 6, Pompeo tweeted a bland denunciation of the rioters who attacked the Capitol and no more. “Secretary Pompeo has put out stronger statements against journalists,” a State Department official who resigned last week in protest told me.
Pompeo’s last-minute maneuverings had no purpose but to cause chaos for the incoming administration, a fact that Biden’s team will have to remind the media of as they set about undoing the damage. Biden can’t do much about the traps that have been set except defuse them as best he can, but he should use this moment as the impetus to take a strong stand against the havoc he’s inheriting. At a minimum, he should reinvigorate Congressional and State Department investigations into various improprieties, which Pompeo tried to shut down. But everything should be on the table when it comes to holding Trump and his appointees accountable for corrupting and degrading America’s most vital institutions. Deterrence is the only way to deal with Pompeo’s treachery and to ensure that future saboteurs never again gain a foothold in the executive branch.
