Duty, Honor, and the Middle East
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

President Trump’s decision to send Secretary of State Pompeo to Cairo strikes us as a smart move, even if — or particularly if — it was, as we gather it was, set in motion long before the tumult over the President’s plan to pull back our GIs from Syria. Mr. Pompeo laid out in his speech an encouraging statement of the strategy that Mr. Trump has been pursuing in the Middle East.
Mr. Pompeo himself reminded us a bit of Babe Ruth, walking up to home plate, pointing to the far stands, and . . . whammo. Mr. Pompeo hit two home runs, by our lights. One was publicly dialing in Israel as a partner in the fight against Iran. The other was in confronting directly President Obama’s errors in his own speech in Cairo at the start of his first term ten years ago.
The need to dial Israel into the broader Mideast has bothered us for years. It goes back to the failure of President George H.W. Bush to insist in 1991 that Israel be permitted to participate in the coalition to oust Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait. We’ve long felt that Mr. Bush, though a heroic figure, missed an opportunity to bring Israel and the Arabs together.
Mr. Pompeo didn’t mention Bush’s exclusion of Israel from the Gulf War coalition. The secretary did, though, praise the emerging entente between the Jewish state and many of its longtime Arab adversaries. It was a contrast not only to Mr. Bush but also to President Obama, who in Cairo had scolded Israel on the Palestinians and demanded Israel halt its settlements in Judea and Samaria.
Secretary Pompeo’s second home run was in sweeping aside the larger strategic errors that Mr. Obama made in 2009. Mr. Pompeo rejected Mr. Obama’s implication that radical Islamist terrorism was a response to colonialism and Western faults rather than the product of radical Islam’s own ideology. Mr. Pompeo bluntly rejected any suggestion that America abandoned its ideals after 9/11.
“In falsely seeing ourselves as a force for what ails the Middle East,” Mr. Pompeo said in Cairo, “we were timid in asserting ourselves when the times — and our partners — demanded it.” He went on to speak of Mr. Trump’s willingness to use force in Syria, including missiles on two occasions. He explained Mr. Trump’s determination to honor his commitments, including moving our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
Mr. Pompeo did not get into the particulars of President Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria, but he certainly marked a strategy for focusing the Arab states and Israel together on the central problem of Iran, which was mentioned 27 times by Mr. Pompeo. He explicitly vowed that America supports, as he put it, “Israel’s efforts to stop Tehran from turning Syria into the next Lebanon.”
The secretary’s speech was promptly mocked by the Democratic press. The Times sicced one of its veteran fact checkers on the speech; she came up with one “exaggerated,” one “needs context,” and a “misleading,” which struck us as small beer. Our favorite headline of the genre was in Vox, which bruited that the speech disclosed a “total incoherence” in Mr. Trump’s Mideast policy.
Vox is suggesting that the “entire reason” Mr. Pompeo is in the Middle East is to reassure allies following the announcement of the pullback in Syria. Yet that doesn’t click, given that most of what Mr. Pompeo marked has been underway well before the adjustment of the order of battle in Syria. What we heard was a much wider strategy stretching from Ankara to Riyadh and Yemen to Tehran.
It’s reassuring to see it come into focus. With the politics in Washington, this is a moment to remember that the result, if not for everyone the intent, of the Watergate scandals that toppled Nixon was to undermine our ability to stick with our commitments in Vietnam. It would be a tragedy were something like that to happen in the Middle East. So we liked the way Mr. Pompeo couched his own worldview in terms of the code he learned at West Point, which is why we put up the headline “Duty, Honor, and the Middle East.”
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Image: Secretary Pompeo, United States State Department, via Wikipedia.