Mike Pompeo’s Mission: Clean Up Trump’s Messes

This week’s North Korea meeting is just the latest challenge in a larger balancing act for the secretary of state.

One of the first problems that Mike Pompeo solved for Donald Trump was the President’s Daily Brief. On every morning (or at least some of them), the president has traditionally received the most crucial findings of the United States spying apparatus, personally delivered in a solemn face-to-face exchange with a senior intelligence official. Beginning in late 2016, a series of anonymously sourced reports claimed that Trump was not taking the brief with sufficient frequency, or seriousness, or focus, or preparation. Even after the inauguration, there were claims that the spies did not trust him and were holding the good stuff back; there were claims that Trump did not even believe in objective reality. In the middle of it was Pompeo, Trump’s new C.I.A. director, who some in the president’s circle felt was the man best suited to educate Trump about the complexities of foreign policy. The president “has a steep learning curve, but you’ve got to get him up it quickly,” Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former senior adviser, says he told Pompeo.

The day after the inauguration, Bannon recalls, Pompeo showed Trump around his office in Langley, Va. Pompeo, he says, “can connect with this guy. You can tell the president is differently engaged with Pompeo than with anybody else.” Pompeo learned to arrive at the White House with answers to the president’s favorite questions:

Why should we care?

What’s in it for us?

Can anyone else do it?

How much does it cost?

By mid-2017, the gripes about the president’s briefing habits grew milder. Now the focus had narrowed to Trump’s dislike of written briefings. In early 2018, Pompeo appeared on a panel and made it sound as if everything was normal. As a listener, he said, Trump was “at the same level” as 25-year intelligence veterans: “He’s using it. He’s taking it on board.” He even had examples in which Trump had drilled down into P.D.B. items on Yemen and Venezuela. Pompeo’s interlocutor, the Washington Post columnist and former Bush administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen, seemed convinced. Two days later, he repeated Pompeo’s claims, unchallenged, in The Post. The headline: “Rest Easy About Trump’s Fitness.”

Pompeo, one of the last remaining members of Trump’s original White House team, is now secretary of state. As Trump tries to execute some hairpin policy turns, often by tweet, it is Pompeo who travels the world to clean up the wreckage. Gen. Michael Hayden, the former C.I.A. and National Security Agency head, likens him to Winston (the Wolf) Wolfe, Harvey Keitel’s hard-nosed problem-solver in “Pulp Fiction.” It’s the Wolf who is dispatched by the crime boss Marsellus Wallace to deal with an unexpected dead body in the back of his enforcers’ car. “He’s got to clean up Kim Jong-un, because there wasn’t a deal,” Hayden said of Pompeo, referring to the vagueness of the promises that resulted from Trump’s first meeting with the North Korean leader in June 2018. “Now, he’s got to clean up Mohammed bin Salman,” the crown prince of Saudi Arabia accused of ordering the murder of a journalist — a situation with just as much complexity and far less upside.

One of Pompeo’s most recent cleanup missions took him to the American University in Cairo, where, on Jan. 10, he delivered a speech titled “A Force for Good: America Reinvigorated in the Middle East.”The speech was supposed to be the centerpiece of a nine-country Middle East trip that Pompeo planned weeks in advance. Initially, he intended to focus his conversations with United States allies on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and the possible formation of an “Arab NATO” that would save the United States money while encircling Iran. But this had been complicated by a tweet from @realDonaldTrump proclaiming that “We have defeated ISIS in Syria.” Later that day, the commander in chief filmed a video in front of the White House: “Our boys, our young women, our men, they’re all coming back. And they’re coming back now.”

So in addition to the usual hand-holding and deal-making of international diplomacy, Pompeo would be doing a lot of explaining to skittish allies. The previous day, he visited with United States troops and Iraqi ministers, flying from Amman to Baghdad to Erbil to Baghdad to Amman, and then to Cairo. Three days in, he was already hoarse; his voice at the lectern sounded like a tire rolling through wet gravel. He is a bearish man — the administration’s backslapping offensive lineman, shorter and rounder than Trump. His face is appealing but not handsome, firm but not unkind. He often looks to be surveying some amber waves of grain; you could imagine his official photo gracing the wall of an Elks lodge or a Cadillac dealership. “He just loves the farm,” Pompeo’s wife, Susan, told me, describing his resemblance to the Kansans on his mother’s side of the family. “Hardiness. Hard-working. Stoic. ‘What do you mean you don’t work past 5:01?’ ”

The Cairo speech was designed to serve as, among other things, the Trump administration’s rebuttal to the “New Beginning” speech that Obama gave in Cairo nearly a decade before, which itself had been an attempt to rebuke the mistakes of the Bush administration. The audience was smaller than Obama’s — around 300 in the sterile suburbs of New Cairo, compared with the more than 1,000 who saw Obama at Cairo University in Giza. Pompeo’s crowd was a friendly one, handpicked by the United States Embassy, and a few seats in the venue remained empty. As we waited for Pompeo to enter the room, I was warned, along with other members of the media who were present, not to stray from our assigned area to take part in the general mingling. The constraints were not surprising, given Trump’s own attitude toward the media and his closeness with Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt’s strongman ruler, who has jailed dozens of reporters and blocked hundreds of websites.

The speech that lay before Pompeo on the lectern was an energetic one, laying out a muscular vision of “American power” as a “liberating force.” But Pompeo looked tired, and it wasn’t hard to imagine that some of his weariness was existential. Trump’s Syria announcement had been poorly received by many of his own senior staff members. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis resigned. Pompeo would now have to spend much of the trip trying to interpret Trump’s intentions in public. He would have to walk a difficult tightrope, respecting Trump’s instincts while channeling them into something coherent. If he failed, United States allies in the region might look elsewhere for protection.

In recent months, the leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates all had meetings with Vladimir Putin.

In Cairo, Pompeo tried to spin the announced Syria withdrawal as a sign of renewed American commitment. He said the United States would “use diplomacy and work with our partners to expel every last Iranian boot.” Expelling the last Iranian boot would more likely take years or decades, not the 120 days that was the Pentagon’s interpretation of Trump’s “coming back now.” The genius of the “last Iranian boot” was that Pompeo’s divergence from Trump lay below the surface; the promise of an extended United States presence was never made fully explicit.

Pompeo’s rhetoric was at once revolutionary, claiming to be overturning the policies of the Obama years, and institutionalist, claiming to be rooted in some earlier tradition of American goodness. “It was here, here in this city, that another American stood before you,” Pompeo said. Never citing Obama by name, he ran down a list of his errors:

failing to connect terrorism with its ideological “Islamist” roots,

denigrating America’s post-9/11 conduct and s

uggesting that “a new beginning” was even necessary.

(“I don’t think I ever went to their motivations,” Pompeo told me later. “It was always about how they grabbed the wrong end of the stick.”)

It has often fallen to Pompeo to take Trump’s shifting foreign-policy instincts and weave them together into something legible, defensible and sometimes even coherent, all without angering a president who is reputed to interpret disagreement as a form of disloyalty. Trump’s tweets, abrupt changes of mind and penchant for creating staff turmoil combine to make this a Sisyphean endeavor. And yet Pompeo has tenaciously kept on rolling this particular boulder. You can look at most every place where Trump has made a lasting impact on United States foreign policy and find Pompeo not far away:

withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement and the

Iran nuclear deal;

imposing sanctions against the governments of Iran and Venezuela;

offering kind words for autocrats in Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Pompeo is the primary architect of Trump’s continuing negotiations over the nuclear arsenal controlled by North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un.

In the process, he seems to have retained Trump’s loyalty, even as critics of the administration (including Hayden) credit him with having reined in the president’s instinctive isolationism. “He’s an internationalist,” says Barbara Stephenson, a former ambassador to Panama, who leads a professional association for United States foreign-service officers. “He believes American global leadership is a good thing.” But regardless of whether Pompeo’s conduct in the Oval Office is that of a Trump enabler or a Trump whisperer, whether he is a member of Trump’s war cabinet or the last adult in the room, his attempt to weld Trump’s moves into a real doctrine will outlast the presidency that gave birth to it. Whoever winds up inheriting Trump’s foreign-policy legacy will begin in the shadow of Mike Pompeo.