Cleanup duty

Pompeo, Mattis on cleanup duty after Trump diplomatic blowups

At the Hoover Institution, the pair make it clear they stand for a stable global order.

By BRYAN BENDER

President Donald Trump’s top national security and foreign policy leaders declared their allegiance Tuesday to the global order that U.S. diplomacy fashioned and reinforced over the decades — just a week after Trump upended that order in Helsinki.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis completed two days of meetings with Australia's foreign and defense ministers at the Hoover Institution, a citadel of the foreign policy elite that’s become increasingly dismayed by Trump’s repeated slams at NATO, widening trade war and last week’s private meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Neither Mattis nor Pompeo made any overt remarks about Trump or the controversy over last week’s Helsinki summit. But they repeatedly asserted that the U.S. stands with its allies — and is being tough on Russian aggression; in Pompeo's words, to an extent “unequaled in the history of the United States.”

The effort to settle the nerves of allies after the president creates a diplomatic mess is becoming a familiar pattern for top Trump administration officials. From Europe to Asia, Trump has on numerous occasions questioned the efficacy of longstanding alliances, including NATO and some of the decades-old security arrangements with South Korea and Japan.

"The United States and Australia both know we can count on each other — constantly — even as challenges present themselves in an era of great competition and uncertainty," Pompeo said.

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop also spoke of the importance of American leadership in the world, saying at Tuesday’s joint news conference that "the great appeal of the United States and one of its undoubted strengths is its network of alliances and partnerships around the world."

Mattis, meanwhile, described the annual talks as offering "an excellent opportunity to bolster our relationship ... reaffirm our steadfast alliance and close collaboration" and continue "our 100-year tradition of teamwork."

The officials made several references to the so-called ANZUS Treaty among the United States, Australia and New Zealand, dating to 1951, two years after the founding of NATO.

A top aide to Mattis said the choice to hold this week's meetings at Hoover, where many foreign policy and national security veterans of Republican and Democratic administrations are in residence, was made months ago and was not intended to send any signal beyond that both the United States and Australia are Pacific powers.

But the anxiety here has only deepened in recent days about the damage the president may be doing to America's relationships around the globe and its influence in defending democracy.

"We have reached the point where it is not funny anymore," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Hoover who directs the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and who met privately with members of the Australian delegation. "We have reached beyond the point of dismissing it all as 'It is just Trump, the real government will step in.'"

Diamond, who advised the U.S. Agency for International Development in Iraq during the administration of George W. Bush, said his meetings Tuesday highlighted the disconnect.

"You sit in sessions like I was, and you step one level below the Oval Office, and you step into a familiar world of steadfastness," he explained. "But we don't know what's coming next from Trump. Every time the adults circle around Trump — like a drug addict — to walk it back he contradicts it a day or two later."

Diamond and others cited what they view as damaging Trump actions, not just words. They include the unilateral announcement after his summit last month with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that the United States was halting military exercises with South Korea, his levying of tariffs on close allies, and the rifts Trump has caused in the Western alliance by dismissing longtime European allies like Germany.

Trump’s tariffs on leading U.S. trading partners are "more than rhetoric," Abraham Sofaer, a State Department official in the Reagan administration who specializes in international law and diplomacy at Hoover, said in an interview. "It makes no sense to me."

The Hoover Institution was founded in 1919 by future President Herbert Hoover, who played a leading role in the American reconstruction of war Europe after both world wars. The think tank is a repository for some of the most exhaustive records on Nazi propaganda and the Cold War and has served as an intellectual incubator for some of the top diplomats and national security leaders over the years.

Working just a few steps from where Mattis and Pompeo held their meetings, for example, are leading GOP figures such as George Shultz, Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser and secretary of state under George W. Bush. Its visiting research fellows over the years have included former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and, most recently, retired Army Lt. Gen H.R. McMaster, who served as Trump's national security adviser until earlier this year. McMaster was among the Trump administration's toughest critics of Russia.

The consternation here over Trump's recent actions greeted Pompeo and Mattis, a former Hoover researcher himself, upon their arrival on the Stanford University campus.

"In the Republican foreign policy establishment everyone is upset," Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who became a Hoover scholar two years ago after serving as foreign minister and then president of Estonia, said in an interview. "If you take away the 'Never Trumpers,' there isn't much left in the establishment known for foreign policy expertise."

He said a strong faction at Hoover is still reeling from the Trump-Putin summit, particularly the prospect that the two leaders — who had no aides in the room except their translators — privately reached some agreements without consulting their top advisers.

"We have heard nothing about any agreements," he said. "The Russians keep saying things. What agreements did Trump and Putin make?"

One of Hoover's own has also been caught up in the recent furor. Michael McFaul, a Hoover scholar who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama, was among the people Russian officials said last week they they would like to interview in return for providing American investigators access to Russians accused of interfering in the 2016 election. Trump took blistering criticism for not dismissing the idea.

Tom Gilligan, Hoover's director, issued a statement Friday saying that "an assault on Mike McFaul’s academic freedom for the purpose of retribution and intimidation cannot and should not be tolerated."

Pompeo is expected to testify to Congress on Wednesday about the Trump-Putin summit, while top Democrats on three national security and intelligence committees demanded in a letter to Mattis, Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats on Tuesday to be briefed on the details of what Trump and Putin discussed.

But Diamond, who is working on a book about what he calls the "crisis of democracy in the world," is wary that the president can be reined in from what he considers a reckless freelancing approach to foreign affairs.

"There are only two people likely to be there the next two and a half years: Trump and [Vice President Mike] Pence," he said. "Anyone who thinks they know where this is leading is something of a fool."