Image credit: Hannelore Foerster / Getty Images

December 07, 2018

Pompeo’s Speech in Brussels Was Tone-Deaf and Arrogant

By Julianne Smith

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo set himself an impossible task for his speech in Brussels on Tuesday: take President Donald Trump’s disparaging and often contradictory remarks about Europe and his self-declared love for nationalism, weave them into a cohesive trans-Atlantic strategy, and try to sell it to a large audience in Brussels. Unfortunately, no one—except perhaps Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and a few other autocrats—bought it. Pompeo’s tone-deaf calls for European countries to reassert their sovereignty in the name of reforming the liberal order did not reveal anything resembling a trans-Atlantic strategy. It revealed only the administration’s ignorance and arrogance.

Pompeo’s main message was that the rules-based, multilateral system that served the West’s collective interests for many decades no longer worked. To prove his point, he ticked through a list of the weaknesses and failings of international institutions, including the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the African Union. Anyone who has followed Trump’s public remarks about international institutions—or those of his national security advisor, John Bolton—did not find that perspective at all unexpected. What Europeans did find surprising was that Pompeo lumped the European Union in with those other institutions. “It’s quite a precedent to have a U.S. Secretary of State put the EU on the hit list,” Marcin Zaborowski, the former head of the Polish Institute of International Affairs, texted me after the speech.

Read the full article in Foreign Policy.

  • Commentary
    • The Wall Street Journal
    • April 2, 2023
    Putin’s Shakespearean Demons

    Imagine the condition in the heart of Europe today had NATO’s boundaries remained frozen after 1989....

    By Robert D. Kaplan

  • Podcast
    • February 17, 2023
    Assessing NATO’s Evolving Role

    Over the past year, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reinvigorated NATO, with the presence of major war on the European continent highlighting the alliance’s importance for co...

    By Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Jim Townsend, Benedetta Berti & David Cattler

  • Podcast
    • February 10, 2023
    The View from Berlin: Transatlantic Relations in 2023

    To continue our “New Year” series on Brussels Sprouts, we turn to the state of transatlantic relations going into 2023. The past year has demanded extensive coordination betwe...

    By Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Carisa Nietsche, Sophia Besch & Wolfgang Ischinger

  • Reports
    • January 24, 2023
    How Finnish and Swedish NATO Accession Could Shape the Future Russian Threat

    About the Transatlantic Forum on Russia This policy brief is a product of the CNAS Transatlantic Forum on Russia, an initiative designed to spur coordination between the Unite...

    By Nicholas Lokker, Jim Townsend, Heli Hautala & Andrea Kendall-Taylor

View All Reports View All Articles & Multimedia