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Pompeo Dives Into NATO Diplomacy As Allies Confront Russia

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo waits for the start of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers at NATO headquarters in Brussels on April 27, 2018.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo waits for the start of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers at NATO headquarters in Brussels on April 27, 2018.
Pompeo Dives Into NATO Diplomacy As Allies Confront Russia
Pompeo Dives Into NATO Diplomacy As Allies Confront Russia GUEST: Ryan Crocker, former six-time U.S. ambassador

A top story on Midday Edition come high-stakes diplomacy is underway across the Pacific at the leaders of North and South Korea meet for a summit such high-level diplomatic overtures are rare and can be risky. Most of the time in the US it's the members of the State Department we handle the slow and steady work needed for diplomacy to work. One of the most experienced of those diplomats is Ryan Crocker, a six-time ambassador to the Middle East and South Asia. Ambassador Crocker is in town to speak tonight at the San Diego world affairs Council and he joins us now. Investor, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. Former CIA director Mike Pompeo was just confirmed as Secretary of State yesterday. You were critical of his but assessor Rex Tillerson, what are your thoughts about Pompeo? The issue I had that we had as a foreign service and the State Department with the secretary Tillerson is he basically said about deconstructing the foreign service. Letting a 31% budget cut go through unopposed. Congress stood up on that, thank goodness. But the message he sent from day one is that he did not hold the service ended the career civil service at state in any kind of regard. Have had massive resignations, early retirements and a steep drop in people signing up for the foreign servicing. I think that Secretary Pompeo is going to move and move pretty quickly to start correcting those things. Can he start correcting them if there have been this sort of mass exodus from the State Department? How hard a job is he going to have? The first thing he needs to do is stop the bleeding and I think he does understand that. He knows how government works from his years in Congress. And played two quite good reviews over at the CIA after secretary Tillerson just about anybody would look good to the foreign service, I seen Secretary Pompeo a real sense of how the building works and what he needs to do to ensure that it supports him as best we can. Your former ambassador to Syria. What you make of president Trump's latest missile strike in response to the Assad regimes use of chemical weapons? Here right now for us and for many others is kind of a problem from hell. What do you do? The way I look at his strikes in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons is really not in the Syrian context. I think the signal he is sending by carrying out the strikes is that the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable and it's highly dangerous on a global level. If you put that into a Syrian context though, it starts to get pretty slippery. When we can be interpreted through the Syrian premise is a message from us to the Assad regime that effectively says we don't have any problem at all with you murdering your citizens come kill as many as you want however you want to do it, just don't use chemical weapons and you will be okay. That is how that is being received in Syria. How should the US and the Allies follow-up then? We have to make a decision in Syria and indeed globally are we going to continue the post world war two global leadership by the United States that started with Harry Truman? Or is that era over? Are we done? Some the else is going to have to lead or maybe no one will eat at all and that will be okay. As a member not just of the presidents swamp in good standing, I was previously a member of resident Obama's pop, the foreign service national security establishment. This is an important issue because it wasn't president Trump that started packing that's out of a world leadership role. Is President Obama. If you read the Goldberg series in the Atlantic on the Obama doctrine you will probably appreciate the tongue-in-cheek use of the word doctrine. There is no Obama doctrine. His motto was we cannot do everything subtext so maybe we won't try to do much of anything. So that is the first fundamental judgment that we need to see on the part of Secretary Pompeo. Are we leading or are we not? If you're not leading and we have not been leading for too many years, the world is going to become a very very dangerous place and we are likely to see more situations like Syria developing a North and South Korea I know are not your area of expertise. But what significance do you place on today's meeting between the two leaders, the leader of North Korea and the leader of South Korea? What should president Trump school he when he meets with the North Korea dictator in a few weeks? Been this is all pretty amazing. No Korean expert but you don't need to be to see I think the extraordinary nature of the events of the last couple of days. Doesn't mean peace in our time? No, of course it doesn't, but it sets the stage in a very interesting way. For the coming meeting with President Trump. I would think with president will want to do here is probe a bit, see if he feels he can establish a relationship, not to expect huge dramatic breakthroughs in the first meeting, North Korea think is not about to set that off with the statement that they are eliminating their nuclear program. But to go into that meeting with the view of trying to set the stage, set the groundwork for follow-on talks. I'm very encouraged by this. I have been speaking with ambassador Ryan Crocker, Ambassador Crocker is the featured speaker tonight at the San Diego world affairs Council meeting at the Marriott in Mission Valley. Ambassador, thank you free type. Thank you, Maureen.

Less than 24 hours after assuming his post, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plunged Friday into NATO diplomacy as the allies sought to toughen their response to Russian interference on its periphery and elsewhere.

On his first overseas trip as America's top diplomat, Pompeo hit the ground running with a series of meetings at NATO headquarters in Brussels aimed at underscoring the alliance's relevance in a crisis-filled global environment that includes persistent or worsening conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine.

"The work that's being done here today is invaluable and our objectives are important and this mission means a lot to the United States of America," Pompeo told NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. "The president very much wanted me to get here and I'm glad we were able to make it, and I look forward to a productive visit here today."

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Pompeo's aim is to ensure that NATO maintains a unified position of "no business as usual" with Russia until it implements an agreement to end violence in eastern Ukraine and halts destabilizing actions for which it is blamed elsewhere, according to a senior U.S. official.

Those include the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy in Britain last month, support for Syrian President Bashar Assad's government that is accused on launching a chemical weapons attack that led three NATO members — Britain, France and the U.S. — to launch airstrikes on Syrian targets.

At a breakfast meeting focused on Russia, NATO foreign ministers agreed on "the scale of Russian aggression" and that it "requires a response," according to the U.S. official, who was not authorized to discuss the closed-door meeting publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

"We are in a situation where we've not been before," Stoltenberg said after the meeting. "We're not in the old Cold War, but we're neither in the strategic partnership we were trying to build after the Cold War. So this is something new. Therefore it's even more important that we are able to combine, both to be strong and to have a clear position of unity in our approach to Russia but at the same time to keep the channels for dialogue open."

Friday's meetings will set the stage for a summit of NATO leaders in July at which they are expected to outline more specifics about the response to Russia. The alliance has been trying to hold a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, which has not met since October 2017, before the July 11-12 summit but has been unable to arrange it.

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Another of Pompeo's objectives in Brussels is to prod allies, particularly Germany, to meet their commitments to spend 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense by 2024, according to the official.

That commitment was made in 2014 and thus far only six of the 28 countries who made the pledge meet the goal. Nine have produced realistic plans for reaching it by 2024, but the rest, including Germany, have not.

That spending level, frequently incorrectly referred to by U.S. President Donald Trump as a contribution to NATO itself, is particularly important given the allies' need to combat increased Russian aggression, according to the official.

The official said the U.S. delegation would make the point that NATO is more relevant today that at any point since the end of the Cold War.

Pompeo will also have separate talks with the foreign ministers of Italy and Turkey. Relations with the latter are notably strained. The senior official said one of Pompeo's main goals with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu is to refocus on coordination in northern Syria, where Turkey has been attacking Kurdish rebels supported by the U.S.

That coordination was started by Pompeo's predecessor, Rex Tillerson, who was fired by Trump last month, and had languished in the absence of a new secretary of state.

Pompeo will also renew calls for the release of a jailed American pastor accused by Turkey of espionage, and encourage Turkey not to pursue the purchase of an advanced air defense system from Russia.

As he walked into the meeting, Cavusoglu signaled that Turkey would not back down on the purchase, which is opposed by the U.S. and other NATO members. Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier this month that the production and delivery of the S-400 system is being accelerated and Cavusoglu told reporters on Friday that "Russia is speeding up the process."

From Brussels, Pompeo will travel on to the Middle East, visiting Saudi Arabia, Israel and Jordan, where the future of the Iran nuclear deal and the conflict in Syria will be significant agenda items, officials said.

Pompeo will arrive in Riyadh on Saturday ahead of a series of events that could potentially plunge the region into deeper disarray, including Trump's decision by May 12 on whether to pull out of the Iran deal, and the opening of the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem two days later. The embassy move is deeply opposed by the Palestinians, who on May 15 will mark the anniversary of what they term the "nabka," or catastrophe, when they fled or were driven from their homes during the 1948 Palestine war.

Looming over Pompeo's trip is uncertainty over Trump's policy on Syria, which has shifted between a speedy all-out withdrawal of American forces from the country and leaving a lasting footprint to deter Iran from completing a land bridge from Tehran to Beirut.