By Simon Tisdall
February 15, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - Does Mike Pompeo realise what a foolish figure he cuts as he shambles around Europe, spouting risible tosh about Donald Trump’s commitment to a “new liberal order” and America as “force for good” in the Middle East? It seems he does not. Pompeo is a former soldier, Tea Party Republican, hawkish CIA chief and enthusiastic torture advocate who complained in 2013 that Guantanamo Bay inmates on hunger strike had “put on weight”. Self-awareness is not really his thing.
Whatever else he is, Pompeo is plainly no diplomat. Yet thanks to Trump, his job since April last year is US secretary of state, arguably the world’s most influential diplomatic post. It’s a role previously held by such towering figures as James Monroe, John Foster Dulles and George Shultz. By comparison, Pompeo is a political pufferfish floundering out of his depth. His latest self-inflicted embarrassment is Wednesday’s conference in Warsaw, envisaged (by him) as an international rally to put pressure on Iran.
In the week Iran noisily celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Islamic revolution and its leaders dared the US to do its worst, Pompeo mounted a demonstration of his own. His cunning wheeze was to bring together the pliant nations of Europe and the Arab world in an American-led show of unity that would convince the terrified mullahs to forsake their “malign” activities. What this inept bumbling has achieved instead is to startlingly expose the deep and widening divisions between the US and its principal European allies.
Although the state department belatedly broadened the scope of the conference, the foreign ministers of France and Germany have boycotted Pompeo’s misconceived anti-Tehran hooley. So, too, has Federica Mogherini, the EU foreign policy chief who played a key role in securing the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that Trump reneged on last year. The EU (and this, for the moment, includes Britain) rightly regards Trump’s vendetta against Iran as dangerous and counter-productive. Poor old Pompeo is seen as mere bagman, slavishly projecting his master’s voice.
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