American politician (born 1963) and former United States Secretary of State (2018–2021)
Michael Richard Pompeo (December 30, 1963 – born in Orange, California) is an American politician, diplomat, businessman, and attorney who served under President Donald Trump as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 2017 to 2018 and as the 70th United States Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021. Pompeo is a former United States Army officer. He was a member of the United States House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017, representing Kansas's 4th congressional district. He was a Kansas representative on the Republican National Committee. Pompeo is also a member of the Tea Party movement within the Republican Party.
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It was my pleasure to speak to #AIPAC2019 today. My message was not only to reaffirm the essentiality of the U.S.-Israel relationship, but also that the U.S. stands with the Jewish people and Israel in the fight against the world’s oldest bigotry: anti-Semitism.
The rise of anti-Semitism & anti-Zionism strikes at the very foundation of freedom. The Trump Administration opposes it unequivocally & will fight it relentlessly, from the fever swamp of the UN Human Rights Council to the world’s #1 proponent of anti-Semitism: Iran.
We will not grow weary of this fight. Israel should be admired, not attacked, embraced, not vilified. I’m proud to lead American diplomacy to support Israel’s right to defend itself, stand with the Jewish people
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Diplomacy and military strength go hand in hand. They are indeed intimately related. Each relies on the other. I saw this as a young Army captain way back in the 1980s, when I patrolled that very Iron Curtain that Churchill spoke about. I had the incredible privilege, along with my fellow soldiers, we were there to deter the Soviets and indeed prepare this country for the worst. But ultimately, it wasn’t our tanks that delivered that victory. It was diplomacy, backed by the credible threat of force that we had projected.
There are those who think that Assad has prevailed. I don’t know that there’s a need to declare winners and losers, but the facts on the ground are that today Assad rules over a very broken country with 6 million displaced persons. He controls, depending on how you count it, a third to 40 percent of the real estate of Syria. Much of the oil wealth, the thing that has driven Syria’s economy for an awfully long time, is not in the control of the Assad regime, and he faces a determined coalition put together in part by the institution that I am so privileged to run, whether they are European countries or countries or Gulf state nations or countries even in Africa who recognize that we can’t begin to rebuild Syria until there is a political resolution there.
And so before those sanctions go away... UN Security Council Resolution 2254 will have to have been fulfilled, which means a political resolution to the outcome, so the migrants who have left Syria for Turkey and for Lebanon and for Jordan can return home and a political process can begin to move forward. These sanctions are never something we do with glee, and we do them only as a means to try and achieve an outcome that’s good for the United States and good for the world.
A religion that claims to be one of peace must reject violence that is perpetrated in its name.... When the most devastating terrorist attacks on America in the last 20 years come overwhelmingly from people of a single faith and are performed in the name of that faith, a special obligation falls on those that are the leaders of that faith, instead of responding, silence has made these Islamic leaders across America potentially complicit in these acts, and more importantly still, in those that may well follow...Modern Imams must strive to ensure that no Muslim finds solace for terrorism in the Quran, they must cite the Quran as evidence that the murder of innocents is not permitted by good, believing Muslims, and must immediately refute all claims to the contrary.
You cannot have an effective national security policy without an economy that is growing. We should all be mindful that America remains $22 trillion in debt. That is a challenge. For those of you who – my son is 28 years old. I figure we’ll pay the bills while I’m here. I wonder if we will for his whole life. You have to have an economy that is thriving and flourishing, and the State Department takes this mission on. There is no other American institution that has officers in the field at nearly every American embassy – 180-plus American embassies – where we have economic officers who, for those of you who go decide to start your own business or run a company or become part of a global operation, touch base with our team.
There are another set of bad actors who’d just as soon see you all perish from this planet. That calls out for a different American response. And so sorting those through, figuring out exactly the right mix of American tools – diplomatic tools, economic tools, political tools, military tools, figuring out precisely what the right mix is the task that we engage in at the State Department, but we do it with all of our partners in the national security apparatus as well. So the leadership in the White House, the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, the Department of Treasury – we were talking about sanctions – all of those have an important piece of figuring out what exactly the right mix is.
And so just two things. One, we need to constantly evaluate if we have that right with respect to every one of those actors. Have we got the right balance? Are they still in the same place? Are they still making progress? Are they still serious about addressing the shortcomings that we identify? And then second, we have to be relentless, whether they are friends or adversaries, in making sure when a nation falls short that America will never shy away from calling them out for that behavior that didn’t rise to the level that we hope every nation can achieve.
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What’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s — it was like — we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment. — Texas A&M University (April 15, 2019)