On Twitter, the last few weeks of the Trump administration were wild ones —unless you were getting your news from @SecPompeo, the official Twitter account for former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The republic may have been in crisis, but over at the hollowed-out State Department, it was all #swagger, to use one of Pompeo’s favorite terms.
Pompeo spent the waning days of the Trump administration feverishly touting the accomplishments (such that they were) of his tenure at the State Department-- posting up to 30 times a day, liberally using Trump's hackneyed hashtags: #LeadingFromTheFront, #SoMuchWinning, #StillWinning, #MaximumPressure, #AmericansFirst, #PeaceThruStrength, and, of course, #swagger. Individually, Pompeo's tweets weren't that much (as they were all thoroughly dunked on social media). But seeing them all together in one giant mess of hashtags makes things clearer.
The tweets were lacking on diplomatic accomplishments measured in the traditional fashion—few mentions of any agreements reached, no statistical measures of progress, nothing. To the extent that concrete actions were mentioned at all, they were largely negative actions-- such as withdrawing from international agreements like the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Paris agreement on climate change, and the Iran nuclear deal.
When Pompeo talked about having done something, he mostly talked about the stance the administration took or the attitude it had-- more so than any concrete benefits. This wasn't much different than what we had heard earlier in the Trump administration, when officials began using the phrase “on notice” to emphasize their tough new foreign policy. Over the next four years, the administration announced that a lot of places were “on notice” including Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela. It didn’t mean anything, but that didn’t matter. It was all about the pose.
In particular, Pompeo struggled to conjure up a victory lap on North Korea, despite having to admit (finally) that Kim Jong Un had not decided to give up his nuclear weapons (the rest of us already knew that, since every time Pompeo tried to assert that Kim had agreed to disarm, North Korea would publicly say otherwise). Pompeo also tried to put virtual icing on his farewell cake by saying that Kim had agreed to end the testing of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that can strike the United States.
The first problem with that claim is that Kim only agreed to the moratorium after having conducted (on Trump’s watch) a test of both a thermonuclear weapon and an ICBM that could carry it to the U.S. But even that didn't matter-- Kim later renounced that moratorium altogether. He literally gave a speech in which he said “there is no ground for us to [be] unilaterally bound to the commitment any longer, the commitment to which there is no opposite party.”
Pompeo also tried to spin gold from bullshit by boasting hat Kim had not launched an intercontinental ballistic missile since December 2017. In Pompeo’s fantasy version of history, North Korea buckled under “maximum pressure” and came to the negotiating table. But the problem is that the administration's plan to bring them to the negotiation table backfired when Trump reneged on his promises and didn't lift sanctions. The negotiations finally collapsed in February 2019, and North Korea quickly resumed testing ICBM engines, a key step toward testing the massive ICBM that Kim showed off in the October 2020 parade. Kim has also stated explicitly that North Korea would soon test that ICBM, as well as a number of other new nuclear weapons-- including a new submarine-launched ballistic missile unveiled at a military parade two weeks ago. Moratorium, you say? What moratorium? Bottom line: Pompeo and Trump leave North Korea vastly better armed than they found it.
Trump's Russian policy was a consensus failure- Putin interfered with the 2016 election and did so a second time in 2020. Trump withdrew from the INF treaty and took absolutely no action when it was revealed that Russian paid bounties to the Taliban for dead American soldiers. Enough said.
Iran was a similar disaster. The Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement, despite the consensus in the intelligence community that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons. In another diplomatic failure, Iranian Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei banned any further direct talks with U.S. in 2018, saying "Even if we ever—impossible as it is—negotiated with the U.S., it would never ever be with the current administration." In August 2020, Pompeo was also embarrassed when the UN Security Council rejected a U.S. proposal to extend an arms embargo against Iran, with only the Dominican Republic joining the United States to vote in favor.
Pompeo failed miserably on the Venezuelan front as well. Maduro still rules comfortably, further consolidating his stranglehold on the South American nation after elections in August 2017. The Trump administration launched an effort to trigger worldwide recognition of Juan Guaidó as interim President-- but Pompeo conveniently failed to mention that earlier this month, his Venezuelan diplomatic efforts suffered a serious setback when the EU dropped official recognition of Guaidó.
It was, of course, inevitable that Pompeo would try to defend he and Trump's legacy. Even Richard Nixon, after resigning from the presidency in disgrace and accepting a pardon with its implication of guilt, sought to rehabilitate himself. If Pompeo’s efforts look comical in comparison--if they are a bloated mess of obsequious praise for Trump, empty sloganeering, and half-truths-- they are also an accurate reflection of the man himself.
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