Though former President Barack Obama was not mentioned by name, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ripped his attempts to engage Iran and his “penchant for wishful thinking” in approaching Middle East policy. | Amr Nabil/AP Photo Foreign Policy ‘American shame is over’: Pompeo vows to quell Obama’s Mideast 'mistakes' In Egypt, the secretary of State blamed Obama for a "hesitation to wield power" that left violence in his wake.

To hear Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tell it, the Middle East has been plunged into chaos and violence because of two entities: Iran and Barack Obama.

And under President Donald Trump, that’s changing.


In a highly anticipated speech in Egypt’s capital on Thursday, Pompeo declared that a Trump-led United States has learned from Obama’s “mistakes” and is reasserting its “traditional role as a force for good” in the region, promising to stay active in a part of the world where the U.S. is often resented.

“The age of self-inflicted American shame is over, and so are the policies that produced so much needless suffering,” Pompeo proclaimed at the American University in Cairo.

He warned that Iran’s Islamist regime poses a threat to the region, and urged other countries there to counter Tehran. He asserted that while America is a “liberating” force, Iran aspires to be an “occupying” one. He also pledged to both pull U.S. troops from Syria and also “use diplomacy and work with our partners to expel every last Iranian boot” from the Arab country.

But Pompeo reserved much of his vitriol for the former U.S. president, who almost exactly 10 years ago gave a major address in Cairo seeking “a new beginning” with the Muslim world. Obama had a “penchant for wishful thinking” and “misread our history,” Pompeo said, blaming the former president for many ills in the Middle East today.

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Overall, Pompeo’s speech underscored how much the Trump administration’s foreign policy is pinned on rebuking Obama, who, in turn, had sought to turn the page from the George W. Bush years. The Pompeo remarks also revealed how much Iran shapes Trump's foreign policy.

Pompeo’s blunt approach — he repeatedly declared he was speaking the “truth” — is likely to be welcomed in realist foreign policy circles, where many believe that notions of democracy and human rights are less important than promoting American power in a region where many U.S. allies are autocrats. His speech only glancingly mentioned human rights, but did blame America's “hesitation to wield power” for exacerbating the spiraling crisis in Syria.

“When America retreats, chaos follows,” Pompeo said.

In Obama’s June 2009 speech in Cairo, the still-new president was trying to repair the damage done to America’s reputation following the Bush-era invasion of Iraq, including its use of torture.

He tried to distinguish America’s fight against terrorism from its views on the religion of Islam, while also stressing that was his “first duty as president to protect the American people.” He emphasized that extremism was a common enemy for America and the global Muslim community.

At the time, the Obama speech was widely hailed as a thoughtful and nuanced document. Many younger Muslims were drawn to his message. The president made the symbolic choice to speak at Cairo University, an Egyptian public university.

Pompeo, speaking at American University in Cairo — a private, English-language university founded a century ago — cast Obama’s effort as one that led to “needless suffering” and disastrous U.S. policies.

In particular, he slammed Obama for trying to engage Iran, with which he struck a nuclear deal, as accepting “false overtures from enemies.”

“It was here, here in this city, another American stood before you,” said Pompeo, who never mentioned Obama by name. “He told you that radical Islamist terrorism does not stem from an ideology. He told you 9/11 led my country to abandon its ideals, particularly in the Middle East. He told you that the United States and the Muslim world needed ‘a new beginning.’”

“The results of these misjudgments were dire,” Pompeo continued. “In falsely seeing ourselves as a force for what ails the Middle East, we were timid in asserting ourselves when the times — and our partners — demanded it.”

Pompeo went on to blame both the former president’s actions and failure to act for a plethora of problems in the Middle East, including the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group, also known as ISIS, and the ongoing bloodshed in Syria.

Trump has course-corrected in each of theses areas, Pompeo argued.

In Iran, Trump quit the nuclear deal Obama had signed. In Syria, Trump has twice launched airstrikes in retaliation for Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons, something, Pompeo noted, Obama never did.

Pompeo also spoke glowingly of how the Trump administration had “bolstered” support for the global coalition of countries and institutions that has been fighting the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. That coalition, though, was first assembled under Obama and made significant gains on the ground prior to Trump.

In one section likely to get smiles from some of the region’s autocratic rulers, Pompeo even dismissed Obama’s desire to reach out to Muslims as a whole.

“Our eagerness to address only Muslims, and not nations, ignored the rich diversity of the Middle East, and frayed old bonds,” he said. “It undermined the concept of the nation-state, the building block of international stability.”

Those comments were the closest Pompeo got to a theme he has hammered in other arenas: National sovereignty should never be supplanted by multilateral governance.

While the view underpins Trump’s “America first” approach to the world, it has not always gone over well with U.S. allies.

Last month, Pompeo gave a speech in Brussels that expounded on the importance of the nation-state and the weaknesses of multilateralism, upsetting many European allies who viewed his comments as an attack on institutions such as NATO that they believe are key to achieving peace in parts of the world.

But in Cairo, Pompeo spoke more of the importance of coalitions and alliances, which he framed as key to battling Iran, a country he cast as a major source of terror worldwide.

National Security Action, a Washington-based group aligned with Obama, put out a statement blasting Pompeo’s comments as an unnecessarily cruel mischaracterization of Obama’s effort to engage Muslims to join the United States in the fight against religious extremists.

“That this administration feels the need, nearly a decade later, to take potshots at an effort to identify common ground between the Arab world and the West speaks not only to the Trump administration’s pettiness but also to its lack of a strategic vision for America’s role in the region and its abdication of America’s values,” the group said.

Pompeo did not clarify when the U.S. would withdraw its troops from Syria, a question that has been looming over U.S.-Mideast relations for several weeks now.

In mid-December, Trump announced an imminent withdrawal of American forces, declaring that they had completed their mission of defeating Islamic State fighters in Syria. But in the weeks since, Trump and his aides have sent contradictory signals about the timing of the withdrawal amid bipartisan backlash; many critics note that the Islamic State is not yet fully defeated.

Trump national security adviser John Bolton, on a trip to Turkey and Israel in recent days, said the withdrawal would be based on conditions on the ground, including the full eradication of the Islamic State and guarantees from Turkey not to attack American-backed Kurdish fighters in Syria.

Trump has added to the confusion, saying the troops would return at a “proper pace” while a senior State Department official said there is no official timeline. Other U.S. officials have said the withdrawal could take four months.

In his speech Thursday, Pompeo said that “now is the time” to remove troops — language that in the grand scheme is still ambiguous.



“This isn’t a change of mission,” he added. “We remain committed to the complete dismantling of the ISIS threat and the ongoing fight against radical Islamism in all its forms.”

U.S. “airstrikes in the region will continue as targets arise,” Pompeo pledged.

The secretary of State also asserted that America has never been “an empire-builder or oppressor” in the region — a declaration that many would vigorously oppose after the Bush-era wars dragged on past the decade mark. Critics also charge that American support for dictatorial regimes in the Middle East has helped suppress people’s human rights.

Egypt, the country where Pompeo chose to speak, is a prime example. The country has seen tremendous political tumult since the 2011 Arab spring movements, which led to the ouster of U.S.-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak. It is now under the rule of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, whom activists say is even more oppressive than Mubarak. Sisi has jailed tens of thousands of political prisoners and clamped down on freedom of speech.

But he has also fought extremist Islamists alongside the U.S., a reason the Trump administration has embraced him more tightly than Obama.

Pompeo praised Sisi’s efforts to protect Christians and other religious minorities in the country.

"We encourage President Sisi to unleash the creative energies of Egypt’s people, unfetter the economy, and promote a free and open exchange of ideas," Pompeo added.