Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Breitbart News that American adversaries like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, and Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei “were thrilled” with the “weakness” on display from President Joe Biden during his first overseas trip.
In an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel, Pompeo panned both Biden’s trip to Europe and Vice President Kamala Harris’s Latin American trip to Guatemala and Mexico City.
“Both of those trips remind me so much of the Obama administration and frankly I think they’re happy about it — they talk about going back, say ‘America is back’ back to the years of apologizing for America,” Pompeo said. “We always asked ourselves something different when we traveled and when I traveled with the president. The question always was: ‘What are we trying to achieve? America First is our policy and what do we get for America?’ If you stare at the meeting with the Europeans, he said ‘yup, we’re going to allow an international organization to tax Americans.’ ‘Yup, we’re happy to allow the Nordstream 2 pipeline to continue and to put America at risk.’ ‘Yup, we’re happy to allow NATO countries not to spend as much of their money on defending themselves and America will pick up the tab.’ Then you talked about the vice president down in Central America — there’s no way cutting a big check to Honduras or El Salvador or Guatemala is going to in any way remotely solve the problems at our southern border.”
“Then, finally, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and the Ayatollah were thrilled with the meeting between Vladimir Putin and President Biden,” Pompeo continued. “He got nothing. He showed American weakness. He showed that if an adversary of ours puts pressure on this administration they are likely to cave and that they’ll be satisfied with holding a press conference where they can smile and say ‘boy the world really likes us again.’ We were always very clear: We wanted to make friends and build our relationships but what we demanded was there be respect for us and that they understood we were going to protect Americans. That was the fundamental missed opportunity that President Biden did when he traveled this past week.”
Pompeo said that the Chinese Communist Party — America’s “greatest threat from outside of the country” — is salivating at the opportunities presented to them because of the weakness that Biden offers.
“Remember the first encounter between senior officials in this administration and the Chinese in Anchorage, Alaska, where they excoriated us about all kinds of things and said that our two systems are morally equivalent and then they just watched President Biden refuse to flex American power around the world — American economic power, diplomatic power,” Pompeo said. “They watch every word. Xi Jinping watches that and says ‘I’m going to build out inside the United States.’ We saw this on our watch. I closed the Chinese consulate that was in Houston, Texas. They were stealing our intellectual property and spying on us. I haven’t seen this administration prepared to take any real action against the single greatest threat from outside of the country — the single greatest threat from outside of the country — the Chinese Communist Party. I think Xi Jinping sees this opportunity. He sees that he’s got four years with a president who is not prepared to respond and defend. I’ll give you another example: They refuse to do anything to make sure we hold China accountable for the Wuhan virus that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Those are the things that Xi Jinping sees and this does not portend well for American security with President Biden at the helm.”
Pompeo also ripped Biden for criticizing Trump supporters while overseas — something he did in Europe — and for incorrectly stating that U.S. military leaders believe the biggest threat facing the United States is climate change.
“It was really odd. It was an outlier from the trip to spend all that time talking about the deplorables and — it was just really odd,” Pompeo said of Biden bashing his domestic political opponents while overseas. “It rarely happens that the president, that there are true partisan politics that a president opines on when they are overseas on an important international trip. But you’ll remember this begins — remember he meets with military officials on the first stop of his trip and he looks in the eyes of our young soldiers and he says to our airmen and marines that the most important national security issue in the world according to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told me is the Green New Deal and climate change. That is a bad start to a trip where hard power is the coin of the realm. Our adversaries are staring at us saying ‘are they going to defend themselves or are they just going to go to parties in Brussels and cut deals that pretend to reduce carbon emissions as their highest priority?’ This is a real risk. America was strong for four years. People understood precisely where President Trump and I were on these issues and we made Americans more safe as a result of that. To watch him travel the world and bash Republicans and people who support President Trump was really quite an outlier from a how president ought to behave when they’re on foreign soil.”
Now former President Donald Trump was impeached the first time for withholding non-lethal aid from Ukraine in the summer of 2019 — and now that Biden has been reportedly holding up lethal aid to Ukraine, Pompeo responded first by laughing at the hypocrisy of the matter but then by laying how serious Biden’s decision to hold us the assistance is for security in Europe.
“I shouldn’t be chuckling because this is serious business but it blows my mind because our administration provided lethal weapons and defensive systems for the Ukrainians,” Pompeo said. “We actually provided hundreds of millions of dollars of those resources. We were constantly — I myself too was constantly berated for having not done that and not been tough enough on Russia and these folks cave instantaneously. Look, I hope they’ll change their mind. The Ukrainians need those systems and we ought to support them. It keeps us from having to put our men and women in harm’s way. This is an unequivocal good thing for the United States and for the Ukrainian people and for Europe as well. But you’re right — to watch the media allow President Biden to delay the transfer of, I don’t even know if they have lethal weapons systems they’re prepared to provide, I guess we’re back to blankets and color posters — this is an enormous mistake. It just points out to the enormous hypocrisy inside of the media. We’re going to have to suffer this for a while, but if we do the right thing we’ll keep Americans safe.”
LISTEN TO MIKE POMPEO ON BREITBART NEWS SATURDAY: