AMAC Exclusive
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo unleashed a blistering and comprehensive critique of the Biden administration’s foreign policy in a recent interview with the Center for Security Policy, offering a clear “America First” contrast to the “America Last” philosophy now emanating from the White House. Pompeo discussed a wide range of issues—from the Israel-Palestine conflict to the Iran nuclear deal and from Chinese aggression to the question of whether COVID-19 came from a lab.
Here, courtesy of former Secretary of State Pompeo, is what every American needs to know about the new administration’s disastrous foreign policy.
How Biden is Undoing Trump’s Masterful Middle East Peacemaking
After years of historic progress toward peace in the Middle East under the Trump administration, the Biden presidency has seen a torrent of violence and upheaval overwhelming the region. Pompeo discussed how the Trump administration got three major things right that Biden has gotten wrong. First, he said, “we made clear that Israel had the right to defend itself every day and always do, whatever it took to get that right, and that the United States would be its friend and ally.” Moreover, Pompeo said, “The President made the decision to live up to the promise that he had made, which was to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. We acknowledged [what] everybody knew was true–that Israelis were going to occupy the Golan Heights and were going to control that real estate.”
Second, “we developed a campaign of pressure on the [Iranian] regime that changed the outlook for countries all across the region…And part of that was walking away from the JCPOA, a nuclear deal that wasn’t worth frankly the paper that it was written on.”
Third, “we built out what ultimately became the Abraham Accords” including “a path forward for the Palestinians that says you can have a better life but your corrupt regime intent on terror in Gaza and your corrupt regime that undermines Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank are going to have to change their ways[.].”
Pompeo stated that the Biden administration has “undone” or “attempted to undo nearly every one of those” three things and gone so far as to hand “the Iranians billions of dollars” to convince them to “come back into this failed nuclear deal that had no chance of permanently stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon[.].”
Biden’s Neglect of The US-Israel Alliance
On the topic of the U.S. alliance with Israel, Pompeo said that from the beginning, Biden had neglected America’s strongest ally in the region. “Remember how long it took President Biden just to make the first phone call to Prime Minister Netanyahu,” Pompeo commented. “Those actions sent signals to the Middle East, to the Iranian terrorists that are sponsored by the regime in Iran that said this is a green light, and you see the results.”
Biden Doubles Down on The Failed Iran Policies Of The Past
On stopping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, Pompeo said he believed it would be an “article of faith” for the Biden administration to rejoin the fundamentally flawed Iranian nuclear deal. Pompeo asserted: “The Iranians now know that the administration is going to sit down with them. It’s the same cast of characters, Robert O’Malley, Wendy Sherman, Susan Rice, John Kerry. They’re all back. I joke, when Vice President [Biden] said, ‘We’re going to bring America back.’ Yeah, you brought them back, all right.”
Pompeo said that if there had been a second Trump administration, “our negotiations would have been broached very, very differently. We would have had the chance to have this conversation only with the condition that the sanctions weren’t going to be released until we had a path that could create… maximal certainty that the Iranians had given up on their ambition to have a nuclear weapon.”
Pompeo also pushed back on what he said was the false media claim that America was going it alone when it chose to continue sanctioning Iran. Pompeo maintained that the Trump administration had built a historic coalition to counter Iranian nuclear proliferation. He said, “Iran was never as isolated as it was on January 19th [2021]. Arab nations, nations all across the world, [and] many European nations understood that Iran was the central destabilizing force in the Middle East as well and was prepared to join us in executing on the vision that we had for how to convince the regime to change its direction.”
How The Biden Administration Is Making The Israel-Palestine Conflict Worse
On Hamas and the Israel-Palestine conflict, Pompeo argued that the reason why the Trump and Biden State Departments have approached the issue so differently is because the Biden administration is not treating Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and their allies in Iran as the radical Islamist ideologues that they are. Pompeo remarked: “These are ideologues who believe deeply in the extermination of the Jewish state. So, when they think that they have weakness in the United States when they have a sense that the first thing out of the bag that’s going to get said isn’t, ‘You know Israel has every right to defend itself. They should go take care of this problem set,’ period, full stop. When they think there’ll be a whisper on the end of that, a whisper that says, there’s some moral equivalence between these terrorists, Hamas, whose mission set is to kill civilians, to drive international outrage, and the Israelis who do everything they can to not kill civilians, when they sense there’ll be an expression of moral equivalence such as asking for a ceasefire, they know this is not a red light, this is not something that concerns them, and they are likely to do just the kind of violence you’re seeing today.”
Pompeo noted that another Biden administration foreign policy decision that has led to more violence in the Middle East is returning funding to the Palestinian Authority and pulling back sanctions from Iran. He asserted: “the other thing that this administration did is they turned back on the funding. They told the Palestinians we’re going to pay the money.” “We made very clear we’re not going to use American taxpayer dollars to underwrite terror regimes[.].” But Pompeo argued, “So long as Iran has money, its ideological drive to destroy Israel is not likely to change. You have to cut off their capacity to continue to underwrite these terrorists, not only Hezbollah, not only Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic jihad, but the Houthis.” Pompeo asserted that “Until we take down the Iranian regime’s capacity to inflict these terror militias on the world, it’s very difficult for any nation, including Israel, to completely defend against their capacity to do this build-up.”
China’s Extortion Campaign Against America
Pompeo then turned to address the rise of China, a country that imposed sanctions on him on January 20, 2021, within minutes of Biden becoming President. Pompeo said the reason China had sanctioned him as a private citizen is that “we were literally the only administration in the last 40 years that was prepared to call what we were seeing happening to the United States from China as adversarial. We were the first to acknowledge that we were going to have to confront it, whether it was the intellectual property and the tens of millions of American jobs lost as a result of that, whether it was the United Front operations conducted here inside the United States.”
Pompeo also thinks that China sanctioned him and other Trump administration officials because China was “sending a message to all the senior leaders in the Biden Administration that says if you want to go back into the private sector and make a whole lot of money like you were doing on January 19th, you better be really careful in how you treat China while you’re in office.” Pompeo said he thought that was “outrageous.” “They are essentially performing a form of coercion and extortion against American government officials[.].”
China’s Coronavirus Cover-Up Akin To Chernobyl
On China’s cover-up of evidence indicating that the coronavirus may have come from its Wuhan Institute of Virology, Pompeo said that from the beginning of the pandemic, China had gone “full Chernobyl.” “That is they were not going to let anybody have access to any information, any data.”
“At one point,” Pompeo recalled, “They tried to blame the United States for having brought the virus upon the world. This was the classic disinformation campaign voiced upon the world.” But, according to Pompeo, “the overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence suggests that the Chinese were working on this virus in their laboratory, that the laboratory was unsafe, that the laboratory actors whether they were doctors or technicians, were conducting a set of activities that made the virus more human to human spreadable and likely more lethal as well, and then somehow it likely got out of that laboratory.” Pompeo continued, “Their reckless behavior in terms of covering up where patient zero came from or where this virus actually began… suggests that there’s something that they do not want the world to know.”
China’s Uyghur Genocide Comparable To Nazi Germany
Pompeo commented as well on how he came to the decision to call China’s violent acts inflicted upon the Uyghur population “genocide.” He said that what China was doing to the Uyghurs reminded him of “what was happening in Europe in the 1930s.” He stated: “The scale is unimaginable. A million people are held in things that are akin to concentration camps, forced sterilizations, and abortions, people who are disconnected from their families and never permitted to talk to them again, re-education camps. We know these things. History teaches about these things. The intention is to bring Han Chinese to the west and stamp out the Uyghurs, the mostly Turkic Muslim populations there. So, it was really important that the United States lead and that the world begin to stand up against this genocidal behavior.” Pompeo made the point that the U.S. still needs to stand up against China’s genocide by boycotting the Beijing Olympics, arguing, “The fact that we’re going to likely hold an Olympics inside of China, a genocide Olympics inside of China in just a handful of months should shock the conscience of every person around the world.”
Why The U.S. Must Boycott The Beijing Olympics
Pompeo concluded his discussion of China by advocating for the Biden administration to continue the successful policies of the Trump era, which held China accountable. Pompeo said a good starting point would be to have the U.S. boycott the Beijing Olympics: “[T]he Chinese Communist Party must be accountable for the things they do. They are the first order bad guys[.].” “[W]e should never shy away from this. I’ve talked about this with respect to the Olympics. Think about this. If you’re a network television station going to send journalists to broadcast the Olympics from China in 2022 and your journalists decide they want to say something about Xi Jinping that is not lovely and positive, what’s the chance that they get to come home to their family? Should you put your journalists in a place where you know that they’ve been canceled, silenced, or prohibited from speaking in a way that reflects the truth of what you will likely see on the ground when you go there unless your minder keeps you away from it? These are important questions that we should ask to every commercial entity that’s engaged in these kinds of businesses. Do you want to be part of the silencing machine of that surveillance state, of that genocidal regime? I think most business leaders would say, ‘No, thanks. We’ll figure out another way to make money.’”