Tillerson was a pathetic last gasp. He argued against tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, tried to pursue diplomacy with North Korea, and opposed pulling out of the Paris climate accord. But these views simply alienated him from Trump, who sees any deal he has not brokered as a rip-off. And in a bitter irony, Tillerson—despite believing in diplomacy—emasculated the State Department, thus undermining America’s capacity to pursue it for years to come.

In Pompeo, Trump is turning to a new Republican foreign-policy elite: one whose ideological lineage dates not to Eisenhower but to McCarthy, not to Nixon and Kissinger but to Goldwater, not to George H.W Bush but to Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. The conservative movement, long hostile to its party’s moderate foreign policy establishment, is creating a new foreign policy establishment of its own.

It’s useful to see Pompeo as part of a cadre of influential, foreign policy-oriented, Republican politicians that includes Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. All four were elected to Congress with support from the Tea Party, a movement that depicted moderate Republicans —as Goldwater once depicted Eisenhower and Nixon—as complicit with the welfare state. Pompeo has particularly close ties to the Tea Party’s most important funders, the Koch Brothers.

On foreign policy, the American right has historically oscillated between isolationism and crusading interventionism. The Koch Brothers and Rand Paul lean toward isolationism. Rubio and Cotton lean toward crusading interventionism. What they all share is self-righteousness. The United States is pure; its adversaries are wicked. Thus, America must either shun other nations or dominate them. What it cannot do is recognize that even its adversaries have reasonable fears and legitimate interests, which America should try to accommodate.

Because America is pure and its enemies are evil, accommodating them is immoral. Like Goldwater and William F. Buckley, who saw compromise with communist regimes as appeasement, Pompeo has called the Iran deal “surrender” and insisted that the United States make “no concessions” in any talks with North Korea.

By depicting accommodation as surrender, the Cold War right opened the door to preventive war. James Burnham, perhaps the most influential foreign policy writer at Buckley’s magazine, National Review, all but proposed a preventive war to prevent the Soviet Union from attaining nuclear weapons. Buckley proposed using nuclear weapons to stave off defeat in Vietnam. Similarly, Pompeo—like Cotton—has said destroying Iran’s nuclear program via war is “not an insurmountable task.” And unlike Tillerson, he has described America’s goal in North Korea as regime change.

Historically, the right’s belief in America’s purity—and the impurity of other nations—has also made it skeptical of binding the United States to international institutions or within international law. Tillerson acknowledged that America was contributing to climate change, and should participate in global agreements aimed at mitigating it. Pompeo disagrees.