Pompeo Promises to Return ‘Swagger’ to the State Department

WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson once admitted that he had never known a single American diplomat before joining the Trump administration, a surprising admission for a well-traveled executive that many in Foggy Bottom found insulting and dispiriting.

By contrast, his successor, Mike Pompeo, assured hundreds of diplomats on Tuesday that he not only knew many of them already, but that he also had a deep appreciation for their work and commitment to the United States.

“You chose to be a foreign service officer, or a civil servant, or to come work here in many other capacities — and to do so because you’re patriots, and great Americans, and because you want to be an important part of America’s face to the world,” Pompeo said in brief remarks during a formal arrival ceremony at the department’s headquarters.

“My mission will be to lead you and allow you to do that, the very thing you came here to do,” he said, to great applause. Pompeo also promised the crowd that he would help American diplomats regain their “swagger,” alluding to a department that had been diminished under Tillerson.

Tillerson pushed out hundreds of the State Department’s most experienced leaders. He spent $12 million on corporate consultants in a fruitless reorganization project led by young business professionals who had to be told that Ottawa, Canada’s capital, was in a foreign country. And he sometimes met with foreign leaders and then refused to tell American diplomats who dealt with those countries what was said.

On Wednesday, for Pompeo’s ceremonial swearing in, President Donald Trump will take his first trip to the State Department. It will signal to the world — and, perhaps just as important, to the rest of his administration — that Pompeo is now in charge of U.S. foreign policy.

Tillerson never got that kind of forceful endorsement and was often undercut by Trump openly disagreeing with him. The president also gave some of the administration’s most important foreign policy assignments to Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, including an effort to broker peace in the Middle East and another to rescue the relationship with Mexico. And Tillerson never visited Israel without the president, an extraordinary hole in his travel itinerary.

Pompeo fixed that omission almost immediately, hopping on a government jet hours after his Senate confirmation on Friday for a four-day trip to Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Jordan.

The trip sent “a pretty clear signal that the new secretary of state intends to establish himself as the major force in the administration’s foreign policy,” said Aaron David Miller, a former top Middle East negotiator at the department.

Pompeo has promised to spend the next several weeks in Washington sorting out the mess that Tillerson left behind.

There are scores of top positions in the State Department that have been left vacant for more than a year, including ambassadorships in South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. And in Pompeo’s office sit more than 1,400 memos needing his approval for significant spending decisions — decisions Tillerson never got around to making.

As important, in the coming weeks, Pompeo faces crucial deadlines involving Russia, North Korea, Syria, China and Venezuela. He must also mend some of the United States’ closest alliances that are on shakier ground than they have been in decades.

European allies, for instance, are worried that Trump will soon start a trade war against them and renounce the Iran nuclear accord, a pact many see as vital to their national security.

Trump also faces a potential trade war with China and an increasingly combative relationship with Russia, and he has unnerved Japan with his plans for a summit meeting with Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader.

Pompeo has promised that he would soon speak in more detail to the State Department about his plans and leadership strategy.

But on Tuesday, he simply tried to reassure a dispirited diplomatic corps that they need “to be in every corner, every stretch of the world, executing missions on behalf of this country.”

“And it is my humble, noble undertaking to help you achieve that.”