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Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo praises Trump’s interventionist side
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With the interventionist version of President Trump on the upswing, one of its most forceful cheerleaders – former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – took a recent victory lap in New Hampshire.
Pompeo, who served as secretary of state in Trump’s first term, spoke to the New Hampshire World Affairs Council on June 25. He spoke just hours after NATO leaders feted Trump at The Hague and days after the United States bombed nuclear operations in Iran.
Pompeo called the bombings decent, noble and righteous.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks at the New Hampshire World Affairs Council on June 25. (Photo by Mark Hayward)
“It made the entire world a safer place. America reasserted its global leadership in an important way,” Pompeo told about 130 people. “We didn’t send the 82nd Airborne, we didn’t send a Marine brigade, we just sent America.”
Despite Pompeo’s praise of the president and his alignment with Trump’s recent actions, Pompeo is an outsider in the Trump administration.
Shortly after he won election in 2024, Trump paired Pompeo with Trump’s main Republican primary adversary, Nikki Haley, and announced neither would be working for him.
At the time, news reports said that Tucker Carlson, the former FOX News personality who has an isolationist streak, had lobbied against Pompeo.
In an exclusive interview with the New Hampshire Business Review, Pompeo rejected the notion that American leadership in world matters amounts to warmongering.
“It is weakness that creates the risk. If you walk away, that’s how you get wars. That’s how you get kids killed,” he said.
He spoke for about 1 ½ hours, most of that time answering questions submitted electronically and read by the host, Tim Horgan, executive director of the World Affairs Council.
Like Trump, Pompeo ventured into creative labeling of the world map.
Several times, Pompeo referred to the Israeli occupied West Bank by the biblical terms “Judea and Samaria.”
Palestinians see the West Bank as an eventual homeland but controversial Israeli settlements have put more of the land under question.
Recently, some Republicans in Congress introduced legislation to bar the term West Bank in official U.S. documents and replace it with Judea and Samaria.
“The West Bank has been Palestine for thousands of years,” said Salaam Odeh, a Manchester resident and Palestinian activist who grew up on the West Bank. “Spreading propaganda and stealing indigenous people’s land is not the way to get decent people to vote for you.”
Odeh spoke after being contacted by NH Business Review.
“That’s its historic name,” Pompeo said when the NH Business Review asked about his use of the term. “As an historic matter. If you go back and look at the line drawn in 1948. It is very clear this is the rightful homeland of the Jewish people.”
Actually, Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in 1967 and has occupied the land ever since.
Pompeo said he wants good things for all the people who live in the areas; he said Arabs who live in Israel proper have it much better than Arabs who live in the occupied lands.
Pompeo, 61, has lost 100 pounds since leaving the Trump administration, which he attributed to eating right and fiendish exercise.
He spoke without notes and dropped asides that prompted laughs. Most applause followed statements of strong support for Ukraine.
He recognized several people in the audience, including Katrina Lantos Swett, the wife and daughter of former congressmen, and the daughters of Amer Fakhoury, the Seacoast-area businessman imprisoned by Hezbollah when Pompeo was secretary of state.
Pompeo was a retired Army captain and three-term congressman from Kansas when Trump brought him into his administration, first as CIA director and from April 2018 onward as secretary of state.
As such, he was on hand for Trump’s foreign policy maneuvers of his first term: summits with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, the Abraham Accords, the exit of former President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and the drone killing of an Iranian general.
While mostly laudatory of Trump, Pompeo said he disagrees with Trump on trade. And he wryly questioned some of Trump’s language, such as using the term “love letters” to describe communications from North Korea’s Kim and Trump’s criticism of intelligence reports.
In 2024, Pompeo visited some early primary states, including New Hampshire before opting out of the race. His recent speech was the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, a quasi runway for presidential hopefuls in greater Manchester.
But Pompeo said he also speaks in places that have nothing to do with early presidential politics, such as Louisiana and Montana.
“That’s not why I’m here,” he said while adding: “who knows what will happen in a couple years.”
