155. Mike Pompeo On Russia, Trump, and China

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1:34Welcome to the Riskless Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And we're absolutely delighted today to be with a very, very significant figure from the world of the United States of America, Mike Pompeo. Mike Pompeo is an ex-military guy, but more significantly in recent years, in Donald Trump's first term, was director of the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, and also Secretary of State. And actually, given the rate of churn that Donald Trump went through some of his top officials, he survived in that job for a fairly long time. He's also still very active in the political debate at home and abroad, has very strong views on China, on Russia, on the Middle East, and we'll be getting through all of that.

2:16So Mike Pompeo, welcome. Thank you for being here. And Secretary Pompeo, thank you very much for joining us. It's an amazing moment to have you here in the United Kingdom at this particular time. I wonder whether I could start you on a sort of big issue, which is, where do you sense the gap is now? Are you aware of a gap between a particular kind of liberal center European view and an American view? And how would you describe that gap? Are you aware that there are sort of tensions out there between how some people see Trump and other people see Trump? Oh, yes. No, those tensions don't just exist in the United Kingdom.

2:53They exist in every burg in America, every small town. President Trump is a walking Rorschach test, right? People respond to him. He is deeply charismatic. He is clear. There's no doubt about what he thinks at any given moment. He dominates so many news cycles. So people have deeply informed, deeply held opinions on him. I don't know that it's materially different in one place or the other. My guess is that there would be people on both sides of the Atlantic that would hold very favorable views of President Trump and separately from that, perhaps his policies and those who were both disgusted by him and didn't like his policies.

3:31just described as you've worked with him very very closely as secretary of state heading the cia really big jobs that really matter and we have a sense of him and this is communicated in all sorts of different ways that not really on top of detail doesn't really like reading briefings what was he what's he'd like to kind of to deal with as somebody who's at the top table trying to formulate really complicated policy yeah i mean i spent so much time with him As a CI director, he wanted the director to brief him. That was unusual. It's usually a more junior person in the organization, but he wanted me to be at those briefings.

4:06So I had, when I became Secretary of State, I had the enormous advantage of spending hours and hours and hours with him. He was a fantastic boss. I could go in and tell him, here's what I think. He'd respond. Sometimes he would agree with me. Sometimes I'd present him a set of options and he'd pick one. Sometimes he would disagree with me. He got 270 electoral votes. I got zero. He reminded me of that from time to time. But he was absolutely right about that. And we would go execute his vision of American foreign policy as best I was able to go execute. But he gave me the space to go do that. When I was the CIA director, he gave us all the resources that we needed to go execute our mission.

4:44He gave us enormous space to go build and build and build to do good intelligence collection and conduct operations. And I think we got a pretty good net effective outcome, but the world can judge for itself if that was true. But from my perspective, as someone who was a leader on the national security team, as part of a team in that organization, we had a lovely four years. Secretary, one of the things that's making us very anxious in Europe is the sense, if we quote Ursula von der Leyen, that President Trump is, in her words, weaponizing dependency. In other words, since the Second World War, Europe has become very dependent on the United States in many, many different ways, particularly defense spending, NATO, but much else too.

5:25and for the first time we feel that we are now dealing with a u.s administration which is prepared to use that to extract concessions to threaten to ask us to spend more putting up tariff barriers etc and it's very very destabilizing are you aware of what a profound kind of psychological impact this is having on europe having had a particular type of relationship with the u.s since 1945 suddenly having to deal with a very different type of relationship It seems to me that the, what did you describe it as? The psychological impact it's having is how you characterized it? Yeah. It seems to me that that's a result of failed British and European policies for 25 or 30 years.

6:08The dependencies didn't evolve because of something that the United States did. They did it because of failures of political leadership in Europe and in the United Kingdom, right? It was the Europeans and in the United Kingdom who decided, you know, we're just not going to spend the money necessary to keep our own people safe. We're just not going to do it. We'd rather go spend money at NHS. We'd rather go spend money on fixing potholes in suburbs of London. And, you know, we'll let the Americans go carry the burden. And by the way, we're going to set up enormous non-tariff barriers. We're not going to let Kansas farmers, state that's near and dear to me back home, we're not going to let them sell wheat into our country because, damn, those Kansans are competitive and actually make really highly productive farms and can deliver wheat to the tables of British citizens at a price that, British and European farmers can't.

6:55So we're just going to pretend that GMOs are dangerous. We're going to make up some fantasy. And President Trump's saying nonsense. And so I'm untroubled by the fact that President Trump is trying to call out truths that I think are inescapable. You said them yourself, right? You all have underinvested. They're creating dependencies. I think it's how you described it. And he's trying to fix that. And President Obama tried to fix it too. He tried to do it by being nice and smiling and going to fancy cocktail parties, President Trump has a slightly different model. But is part of the issue not that over the years, successive American presidents essentially have given that sense of commitment to Europe?

7:32And you can argue that we took it for granted, and I would agree with that, but this kind of shock. But Alster, sometimes, you know this, many of us have raised children, sometimes it takes a moment, right? Sometimes it takes a shock, it takes a disruption, a dislocation to actually get someone to not just go, yeah, that's a good point, but to actually act. And I'll say one last thing. I hope that Europe is actually going to act. They've made these commitments about spending that they're going to make two, five, seven years from now. The natural tendency of the human condition and certainly of the political condition is to say, now we're just going to, when the threat from Russia is over, when the Russian aggression is at least brought to a temporary cessation, because I don't think Vladimir Putin will fundamentally ever, I don't think it ends in that way.

8:20But when it's brought to cessation, do the Europeans go, let's just go back and over to you, America. I was a young soldier. I served on the East German border when I was a young soldier. And I did from time to time wander into a wonderful little bar in Bayreuth, Germany and ask why the German kid was sitting there and I was out in the cold all weekend. We were unable to convince Europe to take the necessity for its own security seriously by many modalities that many presidents had tried. And now we're making progress. And I'm happy about that. Yeah. So it's actually, I mean, just two quick markers on that.

8:54I mean, there's much more to it than that, though, too. I mean, the attempts by President Trump to push to acquire Greenland from Denmark against the express wishes, the democratically elected government in Denmark, Vice President visiting Greenland when the Danish government had said wasn't welcome. The vice president coming out deliberately flirting with a far-right group, the AFD, during the German election in a way that no US president or US administration in history has done to start openly flirting with an opposition party during election. US administration didn't even do that in developing countries, let alone with Western European allies.

9:31This is not just about - Oh, British leaders have for decades met with parties out of power. We met with parties out of power. What we did not, what we did not do - And some of which I thought were far left and some of which you may well have thought were far right. It's okay. The point was not meeting with the parties. The point was promoting it. The point was that you had Elon Musk out there saying, vote AFD. AFD are going to win. We all met, right? That's what American diplomats always did. The difference was making it clear that the support was going behind the far right parties. That's what was unparalleled in American foreign policy.

10:06From one person, from a single individual. U.S. government policy was still our partners. The people meeting at the Pentagon, the people meeting at the State Department were the duly elected leaders of each of these European nations, as best I can tell. And properly so. And you don't understand why that threw people backwards, why Greenland disturbed people? You don't understand why any of this stuff is disturbing? No, I understand. No, I perfectly understand. But do you support it? Do I support what? What is it? What is it? Everybody wants to focus. You all want to focus on the noise. You want to focus on the sound.

10:40It's a big noise. If you want to focus on the noise, focus on the policies. Here's what I'd predict. I would predict that the US relationships with the countries that are Arctic nations will be deeper, stronger, and better, and that the West will be more strongly capable of defending itself against Russian and Chinese threats in the Arctic three and a half years from now than it was when President Biden left office. That's the output that we should all be looking for. You all want to talk about modalities and hurt feelings, right? By the way, that's a very left notion. That's fine. You want to talk about emotions and, you know, all the - I want to - The right way people don't have emotions.

11:17No, we are about outcomes and we have emotions. Yeah, but is the outcome to get Greenland? Is that the outcome that he wants? No, the outcome is let's not take for granted the fact that the Russians aren't going to drive a a literally drive a ship through our defensive systems both in air and sea and in space up along the arctic and president trump's determined to go but why couldn't he said and president biden just so you know i went to the arctic council and actually started this very same process and i spoke about security up there and you would have thought you would have literally thought i was the skunk at the garden party because what did they want to talk about what what for multiple arctic councils what was the sole topic that was permissible climate climate change of course well it's quite a big deal um they won't but but let's be realistic about the risks that are sitting there and it was it was taboo one couldn't discuss these things uh and we we brought them to the fore so it's actually the the one thing that i'm a little surprised by uh in your prediction is this idea that somehow what's happening is a massive strengthening of the Western alliance against Russia.

12:22It doesn't really feel like that. It doesn't feel as though NATO - So again, you talk about feelings. Again, you're talking about feelings. Please, let's do data. Talking about deterrence. It's actually deterrence is about perception. Yes, but feelings aren't deterrence. No, no, no. It is about perception. It's about perception, but it's not about feelings. Deterrence is about perception. So if we look logically at what's happened over the last seven months from the perspective of Vladimir Putin, does he feel that NATO is stronger today that the U.S. commitment to NATO is stronger than it was, that the U.S.

12:51commitment to Ukraine is stronger than it was, that the U.S. is following through on its sanctions against Russia? Or does he feel they're rolling out the red carpet in Alaska, the sanctions never arrive? Have you forgotten under which president he invaded Europe? Joe Biden. Okay. No, no. Have you forgotten? Which president did he – three presidents, last three presidents of America. Putin invaded Europe under two of them. One of them he did not. Go ahead, take your pick. Which one was it? No, no, you want to talk about feelings. No, I don't. No, you don't talk about feelings and emotion. I want to talk about real power.

13:28He did not invade Europe on President Trump's watch in the first term. He didn't. You can dispute it. You could say we were lucky. You could say the good Lord was smiling. No, stop. Stop with feelings. Stop with emotion. Stop saying, oh it just my feelings are hurt right he didn't and so if you ask me which why did Vladimir Putin not accept that he should be deterred under Barack Obama it's because Barack Obama wasn't going to do a damn thing and didn't when he took a fifth of Ukraine and then he perceived that Joe Biden wouldn't do a damn thing and Joe Biden in fact didn't do a damn thing but now but I'm just no you you're you you tried to contrast that you said the last seven months how does Vladimir Putin feel.

14:09And I would tell you, for two and a half years, he felt like he could roll through the West, and he did. Okay. Right now, Donald Trump talks about putting sanctions which never get delivered. He talks about sorting out a war in 24 hours, and it may be a figure of speech, as you said when we were talking earlier. He talks in a very different way. Where I agree with Rory, it's hard to assess that Vladimir Putin is not sitting there thinking, I've got these guys where I want them. Would you not agree with that? I don't know exactly what he's thinking. I will say this. I too, were I in charge, I would have done far more than President Biden did, and I would do more than the Trump administration is doing today as well.

14:46On sanctions. By the way, I would be demanding Europe do far more than it's doing. I would tell them, that's great, you're going to spend 5 % in 2037. I'll be dead. I want you to spend 5 % next year. I can't do that in my budget process. I don't care about your budget process. Go do it. The time is on top of us. Instead, everybody just says, well, placate, he'll be gone. He'll be off the global stage. And so, no, I think we should be doing more. I think we should be doing deep strikes into Russia. President Trump doesn't want to do that. Most of the European leaders don't want to do that either.

15:15We should get serious about sanctions. Germany and France should stop buying Russian crude oil, right? They are fueling the capacity of the war machine for Vladimir Putin. So I hope we'll collectively get serious about this. And the$300 billion that's locked up here. And how did you feel about the, on the day that the drones were coming in from Russia and Belarus, that they lifted sanctions on Belarus? Yeah, that was a mistake. Whether it's the day or not, we shouldn't have lifted sanctions on Belarus. They're part and parcel of the problem set. I think that was a strategic mistake. Why is President Trump not being more robust with Russia?

15:51I get that you're criticizing Europe. Why was President Biden not more robust? Because people are trying to find their way through a problem set. You want to suggest somehow that he's been corrupted or he has some connection. No, no, no, I'm not suggesting that. That's what's sitting in the back of your mind. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's your feeling. That's your strange feeling. No, no, no. For two years, I lived it. I've never suggested that. I lived it for two years. I've never suggested that. I don't think he's corrupted. Yes. Well, you're suggesting why. It can't be a good reason.

16:18It must certainly be something venal. I'm not suggesting it's venal. I'm suggesting he's sympathetic to Putin's views on Ukraine. Yeah, fair enough. I don't think that's remotely the case. You don't think he is? What's the reason why he's not doing the things that you think he should do? I think for some of the same reason President Biden chose not to do that. That is, there is this worry about escalation. And so they don't want to go do the things that I described that seem simple when you're out of office. But someone's going to say, sir, if we do that, if we actually take those strikes you're describing, there'll be something that'll happen that'll be bad.

16:49And I'm not suggesting that there couldn't be, that it couldn't be right, that the escalation ladder could be controlled or uncontrollable in ways that we don't expect. But it seems to me it's the time to go identify that and take that on full throttle. And I wish all of us who are supporting not Ukraine, right? We're supporting Ukraine, but we're supporting this idea that the West has to win these conflicts against authoritarian aggressors like Putin. I wish that we would all be more aggressive on military and diplomatic fronts and economic sanctions, to your point earlier. I wish we would all be doing that.

17:19Can we leave Russia, Ukraine and go to the Middle East and what's going on there now? And again, another conflict that feels like it's in an even worse position than it was even a few months ago. And I just wonder whether you can see any way out of this that doesn't involve the absolute total destruction of Gaza and then end to any possibility of a two-state solution. First of all, there's no possibility of a two-state solution. You think it's gone? It's gone. Do you think it's always gone? Do you think we just talked the talk and it wasn't realistic? Yeah, I do think it's been unrealistic. As long as you have terrorists governing those spaces, that real estate and those people, you can't have a state, at least a state as we would understand the normality of a state, right?

18:03Imagine an army in Judea and Samaria. It's not in the offing. You could have certain indicia of statehood. Frankly, in some ways, they've had that in the West Bank for a while. But yeah, I think we're now a long ways away from that. So where do we go? I would challenge your predicate. You said it's worse now than it was three months ago or six months ago. Yeah. I think the decimation of the Iranian regime over the course of the last couple months actually - No, I guess I'm talking on the ground in Gaza, I think. This is all part of a 3 ,000-year struggle to isolate Gaza from the greater struggles in the Middle East.

18:39I don't think it remotely begins to address the set of issues that are underlying the conflict that sits there today. So here we are. Am I right in saying, again, in terms of, I mean, this is not, you know, clearly we come from different political positions, so we're not trying to - This isn't about politics for me. No, no. But unless I'm wrong, my sense is that if I were to talk to you about what we see on the BBC in relation to the suffering in Gaza, you would tend to be very sympathetic towards the Israeli side. You would tend to say we're with Israel regardless of what we do and to suggest that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.

19:24Is that correct? Absolutely not. Okay. Explain your position then on that because that's certainly the impression that I've got. Yeah. Yeah. One is completely free to criticize Israeli policies without remotely touching on being anti-Semitic. I'm sure I've criticized Israeli policies from time to time. Is there any aspect of the way that they've conducted themselves since October the 7th that you think is worthy of criticism? And related to that, we're speaking not long after the United Nations as reporters said that actually Israel is conducting an act of genocide. Yeah. Well, I've not had a chance to read the UN report.

20:02I will read it. I look forward to reading it. I have very low confidence that UN is remotely neutral with respect to conducting an analysis of what's actually taken place there because they begin from the wrong spot in the same way that the BBC begins at the wrong spot. I remember watching something, I don't know, a couple of weeks back, I was in my hotel room and they come on the air and the first thing they say is, the Israelis occupying Gaza, right? It begins from the predicate that forgets that, oh, no, no, it turns out that the 2 ,000 Israelis that were killed on October 7th were actually attacked into what everyone would recognize as Israel proper.

20:38So they start at the wrong starting point, right? In my view. But you can't do historical context in every single bulletin, can you? They don't do it in any of them. but I haven't observed it. Send me the clip when we're off the air. I look forward to seeing it. It's going to take you a while, but I'll be patient. The reality is, no, I think what the Israelis are doing is not only appropriate, but necessary, right? It is necessary for nations to protect themselves from those that are trying to kill them. And this is about Tehran. This is about Iran. Hamas is a tool of the Iranian regime. And so just as the United States took strikes into Pakistan against the Pakistani governments without the Pakistani government's consent.

21:21We saw the Israelis take strikes into Qatar without the Qatari government's consent. We can all debate whether that was constructive, useful, effective, all of those things. But if you asked, do nations have the right to go identify, find terrorists, and make sure that they protect their people from these people who are trying to kill their own citizens, I think it goes far past the right. I think they indeed have a responsibility. Don't they also have a responsibility to have a duty of care to civilian life. Oh, 100%. Oh, yes, 100%. No, more than that. As a soldier, we trained, the Israeli forces trained alongside of us on exactly this.

21:56They warn people before they go in. No military has ever fed their adversary as many meals as the Israeli military has fed their adversary. Why have so many children died? Well, I mean, because Hamas and Iran decided to create war. And by the way, it happened in Europe, right? There were civilians killed during World War II. The United States killed civilians during World War II. All of those saddened me, each of them. Every one of those human lives saddens me. And by the way, you could stop the civilian killing in Gaza today in 20 seconds. You could easily stop it. Hamas would lay down their weapons, agree that they weren't going to destroy the nation of Israel, and they would hand over 48 hostages.

22:37All things that I think we, the three of us, can agree they ought to do. and maybe not maybe maybe one of us would disagree with one of those three things by the way if you're looking to protect civilians there's the tool and that's who we ought to press upon if we're going to save the lives of innocents in in many places that's true in ukraine today as well we should be pressing on vladimir putin to stop the the killing of innocents in ukraine innocent civilians in ukraine and we should be pressing on iran and do you think do you think donald trump is pressing Putin enough with all the levers of this party.

23:10I've already said we should all be doing more. Actually, I would be interested. You said we could debate. Why don't we debate whether it was effective and necessary to attack Qatar in that way? Tell us. Oh, goodness. I don't know the answer yet. I think sometimes these things can't be decided until history has had a little bit of chance to go do the analysis. I think it put on notice those terrorists in suits that there's no safe place for you to be. We'll make it more difficult for them to continue to coordinate their terror campaigns. I couldn't tell you the net assessment of how effective that effort was.

23:43One thing that relates directly to your own work, you were very proud of the Abraham Accords and getting UAE and Israel together. The first result of this strike was immediate condemnation from UAE, Muhammad bin Zayed flying immediately to Doha to embrace the Emir, a joint statement from Arab states attacking what they saw as the illegal and unprovoked actions of Israel. That doesn't seem to me to have been a great foreign policy success. And I can't quite see what Israel thinks they achieved by doing this, if you just look at it in cold terms. Could be. The sweep of history runs deep. You're sounding like a politician now, Secretary.

24:20No, no, no. I'm sounding like a statesman who actually gives a damn about peace and prosperity in the Middle East and actually who was pretty effective at building it out, as opposed to Secretary Kerry, who created chaos, and President Obama, who withdrew and created ISIS, and we were forced to clean it up. No, that's not political. That is about the brutality and hard-nosed foreign policy that does the task of protecting the United States of America. And so let me come back to this issue. I don't think there is a doubt in my mind that the leadership in the Gulf is thrilled with what Israel has done to diminish Iranian capacity.

24:57I think those Gulf Arab leaders all know that the risk to them doesn't emanate from the Jewish state. It emanates from Tehran. Indeed, Tehran today is hosting ISIS, excuse me, Al-Qaeda's leadership in Tehran. People seldom talk about this, but Al-Qaeda today has its global headquarters sitting in Tehran. I think the Gulf Arab states fully get the proposition for how security and prosperity will be built out in the region, and it runs through Tehran and a fundamental change in the nature of the regime there. Presumably, you're not very content with the fact that possibly the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia are going to go to Unger and recognize the Palestinian state.