Mike Pompeo: the Most Conservative US State Secretary?

• 03.17.2018, 15:07
•  America,  World

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"Conservatives have deep distrust of government power, so I not only understand their privacy concerns, I share them," this is one of the famous quotes of the US new State Secretary Mike Pompeo, who will replace Rex Tillerson on his position. Below let’s refer to his biography trying to make some conclusion on his psychological characteristics.

Mike Pompeo presents another political figure in the US experience that, as a successful businessman, went into politics.

Mike Pompeo was born in Orange, California and attended Los Amigos High School. As teenager he loved to play basketball and did not like to study, still was considered one of the smart students. 

"Mike was the type of guy who was just born smart. He didn’t need to study. He wasn’t studying all the time. He could explain things to us in ways teachers couldn’t," as the Orange County Register reports his childhood friend John Reed recalls.

Pompeo left California to attend the US Military Academy at West Point. He majored in mechanical engineering and graduated first in his class in 1986. He served in the US Army, and reached the rank of captain. As a military his main duty was patrolling the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He left the army and attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1994. Pompeo was editor of the Harvard Law Review and worked as a research assistant for professor and former Vatican ambassador Mary Ann Glendon. After graduating he worked for Washington firm Williams & Connolly, before leaving for the Business world.

Commenting on his decision to leave for business world Ann Glendon once noted:  "When he went into business instead, I felt real regret to see yet another young person of great integrity and ability swerve from his original path," Business Insider reports.

In business Pompeo founded Thayer Aerospace (manufacturer of complex structural components and assemblies for the commercial aerospace, defense and space industries) in Wichita with some West Point classmates. Pompeo left Thayer Aerospace in 2006 and became president of oilfield equipment company Sentry International. In addition he also served as a trustee of the conservative Flint Hills Public Policy Institute, which has since been renamed the Kansas Policy Institute, the stated mission of which is "to advocate for free market solutions to public policy issues and the protection of personal freedom for all Kansans.  

In 2011 he went to politics and was the Republican congressman, representative for Kansas’s 4th congressional district from 2011 to 2017.

When asked about the motives of his decision to enter into politics, he told: "I have run two small businesses in Kansas, and I have seen how government can crush entrepreneurism. That's why I ran for Congress. It just so happens that there are a lot of people in south central Kansas who agree with me on that," Business Insider reports.

 In this context it is interesting that his most favorite book is Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, which depicts "a dystopian United States in which private businesses suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations."

As a congressman he was known for strongly opposing Obama's Iran nuclear deal and closing Guantanamo Bay. What refers to Russia, he did not avoid at times criticizing Russia. For example,  speaking at a foreign policy panel in 2015, he said Vladimir Putin is "heck bent on changing the geopolitical future", and accused then-president Barack Obama of not being tough enough on the country, news.com.au.

On November 16, 2016, shortly after his victory, President Donald Trump nominated Mike Pompeo to run the Central Intelligence Agency. As a CIA Head, Pompeo acknowledged his belief that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election, but like Trump was careful to add his belief that they didn’t actually affect the results.  Like Trump, Pompeo is also known for his hard stance on the fight against terrorism, North Korea etc. He was largely criticized for expressing support to the use of torture against people suspected of violent activities. In a statement in 2016, he said Guantanamo Bay was a "goldmine of intelligence about radical Islamic terrorism".

Concluding, we can state that based on the political views and the passed path of Pompeo, Pompeo is pretending to become the US State Secretary with the most conservative and hardest stance on most foreign policy issues.