As to the question, “who is running the USA?” asked by many who realize that Joe Biden isn’t running the country, the answer should likely include Trump’s Director of Central Intelligence (January 2017-April 2018) and then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (April 2018-January 2021).
At the very moment on March 8 that Donald Trump was meeting in Florida with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on the prospects of diplomatically ending the Ukraine war, Pompeo, back from a trip to Ukraine, where he met with business leaders and youth groups, gave an interview published on March 11 to “The Cipher Brief” news website. Pompeo insisted that U.S. full support and weapon supplies to Ukraine should continue, and that a new Trump administration would do so. (Remember Pompeo’s 2019 remarks to students at Texas A&M, how when he was CIA Director “we lied, we cheated, we stole… we had entire training courses….”)
Asked about what to do in the Middle East, Pompeo replied to Cipher Brief: “The administration should be assisting the people in Gaza by reconfirming that Israel must eliminate Hamas. If you want to help Gazan children and you want to save Gazan families, the most direct way to do that is to make sure that (Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya) Sinwar ceases living on the face of the planet.”
Pompeo explained why he and Mike Pence had written in Wall Street Journal demanding that “‘devastating strikes’ are needed at the moment against Iran”: “It is fundamentally the case that a response to the Iranian killing of Americans—that is, to knock off a knucklehead in Iraq—is an epic failure and won’t deter Iran and will cause escalation. So when Vice President Pence and I carefully chose those words, sometimes people mistake ‘strike’ for kinetic, it’s not necessarily the case. There are many tools of American power, things we’ve done to strike our adversaries in ways that aren’t about ballistic missiles and B-52s. But in the end you have to hold something that the mullahs in Iran value at risk, and today the current administration has chosen a different path. They’ve chosen to sit at the table and negotiate a pathway to a nuclear weapon. And you can see the escalation that has followed from that.”
