The Putin-Puppet Slander against Mike Pompeo By Andrew C. McCarthy
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-putin-puppet-slander-against-mike-pompeo/
Far from ‘praising’ Russia’s strongman, the former secretary of state was warning that we underestimate him at our peril.
M ike Pompeo is a West Point grad who served in Bavaria as an Army officer along the Iron Curtain line, opposite the Soviet Union and its similarly monstrous client regime in East Germany. This was just before the Berlin Wall fell and the evil empire disintegrated. He was also CIA director and secretary of state when the Trump administration, for all the then-president’s nauseating rhetoric about Vladimir Putin, treated Russia more realistically and more harshly than the Biden administration has.
As Dan McLaughlin observes, 62 percent of Americans — including four in ten Democrats — believe that if Donald Trump were still president, Putin would not dare have invaded Ukraine. If they are right about that, it has a lot to do with Secretary Pompeo’s clear-eyed steering of American foreign policy. You would never have seen Pompeo brandishing a “Reset” button with his Russian counterpart, much less helping Putin develop technological capabilities — while the Defense Department and the FBI pleaded with the State Department to stop.
That’s why I rolled my eyes this past week upon hearing claims that Pompeo had lavished praise on Putin even as the dictator was commencing his war of aggression. It just seemed too stupid to waste time on with so much of importance going on. But the story has persisted. It is based on a remark that made sense in context, but that of course was deracinated and spun into something it clearly wasn’t after a Daily Beast reporter posted an isolated quote. Fortunately, our friend Byron York at the Washington Examiner put the time in to report on exactly what Pompeo said in a long interview (45 minutes) by Harry Kazianis of the Center for the National Interest.
The assessment of Putin that has gotten the former secretary of state in hot water was as follows: “Very capable. I have enormous respect for him.” Patently, this was along the lines of “know thy enemy.” Pompeo immediately elaborated that he had previously been criticized for offering this assessment, but what he meant was that it would be greatly to America’s detriment to underestimate Putin because he is a rival and he is “very savvy, very shrewd.” Pompeo added that he felt this way because Putin was
an interlocutor that was always well informed and deeply clear about what Russian interests were. I appreciated that. It required the same from us, from me, from my team. We had to be equally prepared and equally protective of the interests that mattered to the United States.
That is to say, if we failed to respect Putin’s capabilities and fully understand his motivations and objectives, the result could be extremely damaging to American national security and our interests around the world. Evidently, though, we have in our unusually idiotic times arrived at a point where it’s fine to underestimate our foes and let them pick our pockets as long as we’re sufficiently juvenile in our choice of insults.
As Byron relates, the remarks about Putin were made against the backdrop of Pompeo’s recollections about confronting the Soviet Union, in whose KGB Putin served as a foreign intelligence officer in East Germany while Pompeo was stationed on the Western side of the line. As Pompeo recalled it: “I patrolled the East German border when I was a young lieutenant. I am not naive about Russia and its desire to impact its near abroad, and their ruthlessness and their willingness to do so.” He added that Putin “does believe that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a calamity — the worst one of the 20th century. As a small part of it — I was a platoon leader in Germany — I consider it one of the greatest achievements of my life. He has the inverse view of that.”
Pompeo further opined that Putin’s rhetoric about feeling threatened by NATO and Ukraine is “nonsensical,” acidly observing that when Putin “raises his concerns . . . about ill treatment of Russians in Ukraine, this is silly on its face. The worst treatment of Russians actually happens inside his own country.”
Pompeo’s bottom line was that Putin is “an elegantly sophisticated counterpart.” I’m inclined to agree with Byron that “elegantly” was not the best choice of words, and was apparently delivered after the former secretary seemed to grope for a better word. Still, the important word was counterpart — Pompeo is not deluding himself that our enemy is our friend — unlike, say, the Biden State Department negotiators currently cajoling Iran’s mullahs in hopes of reprising Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal.
Again stressing that we underestimate the Russian strongman only at our peril, Pompeo concluded that Putin “is not reckless but has always done the math.” We must realize that Putin’s math, his priorities, and his sense of Russian interests as he pursues them are unreasonable, Pompeo concludes, while remaining mindful that he has thought them through and will act on them. On that score, Pompeo emphasized that Putin’s highest interest is Putin — “First and foremost, he is about power for himself, making sure that his place as the leader of Russia continues.”
Apparently, a three-year habit of framing people as clandestine agents of the Kremlin based, not on proof, but on a Clinton campaign political hit-job, is a hard habit to break. But no one who perused what Pompeo actually said could honestly depict him as a Putin puppet. As the Russian dictator bombs Kyiv and casts his menacing eyes westward, the polls indicate that I’m not the only one who believes the United States would be far better served if Mike Pompeo were still steering American foreign policy.
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