Mike Pompeo explains the Trump Doctrine
Mike Pompeo doesn’t reckon himself a media critic, but the secretary of state can’t help but grin at the hysterical coverage that attends the Trump administration’s every move on the world stage. The latest example came last week, when reporters and liberal foreign-policy types managed to convince themselves that Team Trump was prepping a full-scale invasion of Iran.
“White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War” screamed a New York Times headline.
“When you see that headline, it’s flashy, but it doesn’t begin to reflect the depth of the work that’s been done,” Pompeo says as we sit down for an interview at the plush Palace Hotel in Midtown.
Yes, the Pentagon updated a military contingency plan in case the Tehran regime escalated its attacks against US assets and interests in the Persian Gulf. But the plan was one of several options presented to the commander in chief. To go by that Times headline, and others like it, you would think Team Trump is driving America to war, willy-nilly; that Washington is the aggressor and Tehran the victim without agency.
Fact is, Iran has a “revolutionary, theocratic regime that is intent upon the destruction of the United States and Israel,” Pompeo tells me. “That’s the backdrop to all this.”
President Trump hasn’t boosted the risk of a confrontation by ratcheting up sanctions. “The risk is the same” as ever, and it comes from Iranian leaders who “have made the decision that they’re willing to contemplate attacks — kinetic, military attacks — against the United States.”
What’s new is that the United States under Trump will no longer entertain the fiction that Iran’s various militias and terror proxies are somehow independent of the regime.
Pompeo warns the Iranians: “Whether you subcontract, or you partner, or you train, or you equip, or you operate it, or you lead it, if you allow it to engage in attacks against Western interests — we’re not going to allow you to create public deniability. Because we’ll know full well what’s happening. That’s not going to stop us from attacking those who made the decisions to put Americans at risk.”
Looking beyond the current tensions, Pompeo has laid out 12 steps the Iranians have to take if they want to ease the pressure bearing down on them. Among them: “Don’t enrich fissile material. That’s not outrageous. That was John Kerry’s position. That was the French position. It was the British position. Until they gave it away at the negotiating table.” But it’s “fundamental” to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, which “won’t stop with Iran.”
Other demands: Don’t conduct assassination campaigns across Europe. Don’t arm Hezbollah. Don’t undermine Iraqi sovereignty by empowering militias. “None,” he says, “is a hard ask. . . . I don’t think a single person in America would look at any one of those 12 and say, ‘Nah, I think Iran should have the right to do that one.’ ”
The endgame, he says, is for the Islamic Republic to start acting like a normal country: “Just behave like Norway, right? Just behave like Nigeria. Govern. Educate your own people. Create wealth in your own country. Take care of your own people, who are hungry.”
He feels for ordinary Iranians reeling under sanctions, but “I’m convinced that the Iranian people don’t support what’s taking place there,” Pompeo says. “We saw it in 2009,” during the failed pro-democracy Green Revolution, “and we see it in protests today. I’m convinced that the Iranian people know this regime is corrupt, they know they’ve looted this nation.”
see also
Trump says I hope not about getting into war with Iran
WASHINGTON – President Trump suggested Thursday that he wasn’t gunning…
Meanwhile, the press of US sanctions will remain. Here, too, the outcome has confounded Trump critics. “When we decided to” withdraw from the nuclear deal, Pompeo recalls, “I remember the narrative: ‘American alone can’t put pressure.’ ” The Europeans weren’t going along. Democrats predicted failure. “Now these same people are concerned that they’ve worked too well. ‘Oh my goodness, they’ve been too effective. You’re going to provoke [Tehran].’ ”
That reading is ahistorical, Pompeo insists: “We haven’t provoked a thing. This is a 40-year history. This is a trajectory that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been on for an awfully long time. Not only have we not provoked it, we have deterred their capacity to inflict terror around the world, and President Trump ought to get enormous credit for that.”
Team Trump’s dealings with China have also been met with apocalyptic reactions, not least from doctrinaire free traders on the right. But recent revelations about state-backed Chinese tech companies — which have developed a system of total surveillance targeting the country’s minorities — show the moral and national-security stakes in Trump’s trade confrontation with China.
Meanwhile, companies like Huawei help advance Beijing’s technological imperialism abroad. “We think of the economic sphere and the national-security sphere separately,” Pompeo says. “It’s different in China.” Huawei, he says, is “an instrument of the Chinese government. We don’t have this kind of creature in America, because we never take American businesses and second them to a political party, in this case the Chinese Communist Party.”
For too long, American elites didn’t appreciate this distinction and allowed the Chinese to get away with far too much.
Washington, he says, failed “to push back when the Chinese began to abuse their status at the World Trade Organization, when they began to steal American intellectual property, when they began to require US businesses that invested there to form joint ventures so they could get ask to that information and that technology.” We didn’t impose similar restrictions on the Chinese, and instead allowed them to buy up US assets, no-strings attached.
“When all that took place, we should have pushed back, but we didn’t.”
For Trump, the political outsider, it was easy to see that all this was a “sucker’s game.” Yes, deterring China’s trade and tech misbehavior can be disruptive to the smooth flow of markets. “But it’s important, it’s imperative, it’s necessary. President Trump is determined to get that right, and I think the world is now starting to see that he did get it right.”
Already, companies and countries that had signed up for Huawei 5G technology are having second thoughts. “I’ve watched on the Huawei issue,” Pompeo notes, “where we’ve been working for months and months to educate countries about the risk to their citizens of having non-Western technology — technology connected to the Chinese Communist Party.”
see also
Trump again stokes China tensions with national emergency
President Trump on Wednesday declared a “national emergency” to protect…
He adds: “Every Western nation understands that the information infrastructure has to have Western values embedded in it: rule of law, transparency, clarity, rules. If the system isn’t that, if the system is set up to violate privacy and be lawless, which is what a non-Western system would look like, I think they see that it’s bad for every country.”
On China, Iran and beyond, what looked at first as wild Trumpism turned out to be wise, while the conventional Washington wisdom turned out to be so much bunk. Whether it was Trump’s relocation of the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, or his recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, or his pull-out from the Iran deal, the fires predicted by the guardians of conventional wisdom didn’t, in fact, flare up.
“The fires didn’t happen,” says Pompeo, “because at the end of the day, President Trump’s foreign policy is premised on the notion that we’re just going to react to reality. We’re going to accept facts as they are, not as they may have been dreamt to have been or as others had wished or hoped they might be.”
Sohrab Ahmari is The Post’s op-ed editor. Twitter: @SohrabAhmari
