Could Pompeo Serve as Trump’s Henry Kissinger?

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Soon after President Trump said he’d announce his pick to replace John Bolton as national security advisor this coming week, Washington was abuzz: How about Mike Pompeo?

It may be a good idea.

Between 1973 and 1975, Henry Kissinger served as both secretary of state and national security advisor, becoming President Nixon’s foreign-policy Svengali. This “Kissinger model” may better suit Mr. Trump’s management style than the formula known as a “team of rivals.”

Friends and acquaintances of the president’s often tell me he’s a good listener who likes to hear many points of view before making important decisions. Yet public comments after Mr. Bolton’s ouster show otherwise: While Mr. Trump appreciates some expert advice, he’s quite impatient with too many bickering adults in one room.

Which brings us to Messrs. Bolton and Pompeo, who, before serving Mr. Trump, took similar foreign-policy positions. Both were averse to rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea. Both advocated principled, muscular American foreign policy while recognizing global realities and their limitations. And, yes, both advocated replacing tyrannies that threaten America and our allies with more benign regimes.

Then, as Mr. Pompeo emerged from the shadows of the CIA to become secretary of state, he quickly grasped Mr. Trump’s aversion to the words “regime change.” As top diplomat he adopted, instead, the president’s favorite model — economic “maximum pressure” to force regimes to change behavior.

In internal cabinet consultations, Mr. Bolton — a nuclear-disarmament official in the George W. Bush era — apparently wasn’t as pliant.

Publicly trashing his ousted advisor Wednesday, the president zeroed in on Mr. Bolton’s “Libya model” — words that raised Pyongyang’s ire in 2018. “I don’t blame Kim Jong-un,” Mr. Trump said. “He wanted nothing to do with John Bolton.”

Mr. Bolton’s offending words had nothing to do with the Obama-era ouster killing of Muammar Gadhafi. in 2011 — a nightmarish example of regime change-gone-awry. Rather, they concerned Libya’s 2003 decision to decommission its nascent nuclear program and let international and American inspectors oversee and inspect it.

Yet when Mr. Bolton made this “model” clear in television interviews on the eve of the Trump-Kim Singapore summit, all Mr. Kim heard was regime change — a concept Mr. Bolton never disavowed.

Secretary Pompeo, by contrast, pointedly said he’s “not for regime change” during his April 2018 Senate confirmation as secretary of state. It may have sharply deviated from his past as one of the most hawkish members of Congress on foreing policy, but it was enough for senators — and apparently for Mr. Trump, too.

And on Tuesday, Mr. Pompeo confirmed that a no-preconditions meeting between Mr. Trump and Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, at the United Nations later this month is in the offing.

Mr. Bolton reportedly pushed fiercely against such a powwow. Old Pompeo would have agreed with him, but now he recognizes Mr. Trump’s eagerness to put his deal-making prowess on display, so why not meet an odious adversary.

But wait, no preconditions?

While Mr. Trump limits his demands of Iran to no nukes, Mr. Pompeo is yet to rescind his often-bandied list of 12-point demands. Those include an end to Iran’s presence in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon, its support for terrorists, and hostility toward Israel — and, gasp, dismantling the Quds Force, the Revolutionary Guards’ ideology and terror-exporting arm.

Such demands amount to, well, if not regime change, at least a call on the Khomeinist regime to shed core ideology and its reason for being.

Without a voice advocating toughness, Mr. Trump may give away too much as he makes deals with tyrants. Yet he may have trouble handling a cacophony of too many voices, so he can do worse than concentrating all advice in the hands of one foreign-policy hawk. For now, and until his signature “You’re fired,” Mr. Trump seems to like and get along well with Mr. Pompeo.

The Kissinger model could work.

________

Twitter: @BennyAvni. Mr. Avni is a contributing editor of The New York Sun. This column first appeared in the New York Post. Image: Drawing by Elliott Banfield courtesy of the artist.


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