Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo is the White House’s reported choice to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
However, Pompeo, a hawkish former congressman, doesn’t have views that line up clearly with Trump’s “America First” stance. Frequent Trump critic and Weekly Standard editor-at-large Bill Kristol told The National Interest, “I’m an admirer of Pompeo. Pompeo-Haley in 2020.”
Pompeo wrote a column for the National Review in 2015 that failed to name any Republican candidates, but dinged unnamed ones for being “weak” on national security.
“For example, while it is necessary to call out ‘radical Islamic extremism,’ and we should excoriate Secretary Clinton for failing to do so, it is not sufficient — and repeating it over and over does not a foreign policy make,” Pompeo wrote.
Trump during the campaign repeatedly stressed the importance of using the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.”
“These are radical Islamic terrorists, and [Hillary Clinton] won’t even mention the word,” Trump said in an October 2016 debate.
Pompeo went on to write in the column: “Similarly, stressing the idea of ‘building a wall’ as a core of one’s counterterrorism policy is tragically naïve. If terrorists are already on our southern border, a national-security failure has already occurred.”