My old colleagues at the State Department are all a-bubble with the thought that a new dawn of relevance is coming to Foggy Bottom. Secretary-designate Mike Pompeo has Trump’s ear—or so it is said—in a way Rex Tillerson didn’t, so many a diplomatist’s heart is beating faster at the thought that his influence will become their influence, too.
As for Pompeo, he must sense the achievement of a triumph. Two years ago, he was an obscure Congressman known—to the extent he was known at all—for his attention-seeking proclamations about Muslims and President Obama’s “real” place of birth. Now, he will be the senior member of the Cabinet in a chair once occupied by Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams.
Well, let both the new Secretary and his shell-shocked subordinates savor the moment; in the cold light of a tweet-filled dawn, the fond hopes of both will likely be disappointed. The diplomats will not become more influential; the long decline of the State Department will not be arrested; and Secretary Pompeo will discover that he has traded some real decision-making authority as CIA Director for a shadow on the Seventh Floor, a central role for a peripheral one.
This prediction is based on two kinds of evidence, one concerning a secular trend that has nothing to do with Donald Trump, and the other a particular observation that has everything do to with him.
As to the former, it has been at least two decades since there was even a pretense that the Secretary of State is the chief foreign policy officer of government, or the State Department its preeminent foreign policy agency. In our time of perpetual war, foreign policy leadership has been assumed by the National Security Advisor, by an increasing sophisticated Pentagon policy operation, and by the leaders of the endlessly proliferating intelligence agencies. There was a time, not so many years ago, when the CIA and the Joint Chiefs would decline to take positions on strictly policy issues on the grounds that these were the business of the State Department and the White House. In those days, the State Department chaired all the interagency groups created to reconcile differing agency views. The NSC chairs them now, and State—rather than being first among equals—has become just another agency scrapping to have its point of view taken into account. If there really is a “deep state” pulling the strings in Washington, State is very much at the shallow end.
Pompeo won’t change that. The last fully empowered Secretary of State who respected and used the Foreign Service was George Shultz in the Reagan Administration. That was 30 years ago. Since then, incumbents in the job have been either inconvenient individuals parked at State to keep them from under foot, like Colin Powell, or putative political players who have isolated themselves from the Department behind a bristling hedge of loyalists, like Jim Baker, Madeleine Albright, and Hillary Clinton. In this respect, Rex Tillerson was an anomaly only in the bumbling cluelessness of his approach. The others might have neglected the State Department; he set fire to the place as an institution, this despite his more or less sound policy instincts.
There are good reasons for Secretaries of State to stay at arm’s length from the agency they head. The problem with career Foreign Service Officers is that they know too much. They know why your simple-minded plan to invade Iraq and install a democracy won’t work. They understand the tribal, ethnic, and familial loyalties that will frustrate your efforts to consolidate the opposition to the Assad regime in Syria, and why the endlessly trained Afghan military will never win the victory that American generals endlessly promise.
Because they are on the ground, up close and personal, they are the first to sense the damage inflicted by Chinese and Russian expansionism, and to describe the cost of U.S. retreat, not just in Europe, but in countries the Beltway-bound couldn’t find on a map if their next oversized paycheck depended on it. And they want to convey all this to their betters, but these days that’s known as disloyalty. New leadership, in its hubris and innocence, has high hopes; the Foreign Service brings the bad news. It’s all so damned factualand irritating, and it turns diplomats into easily caricatured pariahs to the government they serve. None of this began with Donald Trump, but add a profoundly ignorant President who makes policy by whim, and the dilemma facing any new Secretary of State becomes clear.
So much for recent relevant history. Now for the absurdist histrionics of the current Administration.
Mike Pompeo can represent the views of his experts to the White House and be marginalized; or he can ignore the Department and try to keep his influence at Trump court. It goes without saying that he will choose the latter, easier course, but it still won’t be easy.
Pompeo has risen by cozying up to the President and demonstrating that he thinks like Trump, whatever Trump thinks. He’s been careful not to patronize the Commander in Chief, as nearly everyone does in Washington, whatever their political persuasion. But now he’ll have to do these things at a distance. The morning intelligence briefing, which has been the font and substance of Pompeo’s influence, will now be done by Gina Haspel (if she is confirmed by the Senate). The redoubtable John Bolton, not known as a team player, will be constantly at the President’s ear. Pompeo, by contrast, will often be traveling, and even when in Washington he will be bogged down in Departmental arcana. He’ll become a voice on the phone, another supplicant begging for face time. Meanwhile, he will being undercut by the inevitable whispering campaign that has become the constant background noise in an Administration whose mantra is: Do unto others before they do unto you.
Pompeo may think he’ll keep his close ties to the intelligence community, but that won’t happen either. The common wisdom is that he’s earned their respect in his brief time at the CIA, but once he crosses the Potomac to Foggy Bottom they won’t want to know him. It will be like being traded from the Patriots to the Jets. You’re still in the game, only not in prime time.
Pompeo will begin at State with a great reserve of good will. Just scrapping Tillerson’s antic reorganization plan—as he’s bound to do—will build a lot of credit. He’ll have the pull to get ambassadorships and other senior positions filled, and his screwball proclamations on Muslims and 9/ll conspiracies will be dismissed as the politically motivated ravings of a Congressman on the make.
But it won’t make much difference in the long run. The reality is that Trump despises diplomats—at least,our diplomats– and he now has John Bolton perfectly placed to amplify his prejudice. Trump won’t suddenly see the virtues of a professional diplomatic service because Pompeo is at State. On the contrary, the Presidential nostrils will be quivering for any hint that Pompeo has been “captured by the building.” Whether true or not, the leaks will pour forth and Pompeo will learn that moving from the CIA to the State Department has made him both a more tempting target and much easier to ignore.
This applies particularly to Russia. Experts (and not just at the State Department) think Russia means to disrupt our democracy and destroy our key alliance. Trump doesn’t think so. If Pompeo doesn’t want the public flaying his predecessor received, he won’t be sounding the tocsins against the Russian menace, at least in the President’s hearing—and probably not at all.
Finally, Pompeo has the burden of being seen as influential. That means the first order of business will be to take him down a peg, or possibly two. So it was with Bannon, with Kelly, and with McMaster, and so it will be with Pompeo and eventually with Bolton, too, if he displeases his master: death by a thousand tweets.
To succeed, therefore, Pompeo will need a keen ear for wild changes in Trump’s policy, the wit to seem as if he agrees no matter how sharp the swerve, and a gift for convincing his boss that any idea that leads to success (or, at least, the absence of failure) was Trump’s idea in the first place. That last task will be simple if only because narcissists are easy to stroke; the others will be more difficult. These are diplomatic skills, but Pompeo will have to exercise them while disdaining diplomats. Even that is hardly the greatest of the hypocrisies upon which his continued tenure will depend.
And what of State while all of this plays out? It is generally true that Presidents begin by distrusting the State Department. Distrust of the military (and the intelligence community) is usually learned the hard way. For all of Trump’s wild and aggressive flailing, our country is in retreat around the world. As long as Trump is President, the advance to the rear will continue, swelled by spineless Congressional Republicans and various disreputable relatives and hangers on. Pompeo is only the latest to queue up near the head of the line. The State Department will be left to its facts, its cautions, its infuriating prudence, and its quibbling expertise. Let’s hope that a few professionals have the stomach to trudge forward for three years or even for seven, so that they can be there when we start building an American foreign policy worthy of our great nation from the rubble.