Pompeo Mideast trip fails to ease questions over US goals

Bloomberg

Secretary of State Michael Pompeo arrived in the Middle East a week ago on a mission to prove the Trump administration can be a reliable partner in tackling the region’s thorniest problems. He returns having failed to stifle doubts that have dogged the US for years.
With stops in eight countries in eight days, Pompeo sought to hammer home how different President Donald Trump’s approach is from that of his predecessor Barack Obama: It will focus on countering, not embracing, Iran’s regime. Despite Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria, Pompeo said the US is committed to finishing the fight there against IS. The US, he argued, is a “force for good.”
But progress was slim. Missing throughout the trip was any concrete plan or vision for how to move beyond the problems that already bedevil the region.
In the background was the drumbeat of the continuing federal government shutdown, new reports about the investigations into Trump and Russia, and the president’s own Twitter feed. It all made for weakened leverage for America’s top diplomat.
“The US rolls in hot without a plan or the architecture of policy planning and bureaucracy to support its aims,” said Karen Young, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who focusses on the Middle East. “The underlying anxiety of dealing with the Trump administration, with its domestic upheaval, and its foreign policy towards the Middle East that changes daily, is exhausting and counterproductive to diplomacy.”
Like his predecessor Rex Tillerson, Pompeo wasn’t immune from the Trump Twitter treatment. The president fired off a missive that threatened economic “devastation” against NATO ally Turkey if it attacked US-allied Kurdish fighters in Syria after American troops withdraw.
Pompeo, who grew close to Trump when he served as CIA director, seemed uncharacteristically unprepared. Asked to explain the president’s remark, Pompeo said only: “We apply sanctions in many places around the world. I assume he’s speaking about those kinds of things, but you would have to ask him.”
Almost 24 hours after his first tweet, Trump sent a much more conciliatory message, saying he had talked with Erdogan “about economic development between the US & Turkey — great potential to expand!”
A stopover by Pompeo in Iraq was geared as much towards damage control — healing a rift over Trump’s trip to the country last month, when he didn’t meet the nation’s new leaders — as it was about reinforcing the US commitment to Iraq’s stability.