Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared Thursday that the United States has learned from its past “mistakes” and “reasserted its traditional role as a force for good” in the Middle East, lobbing criticism at both the Obama administration and Iran by denouncing “false overtures from enemies.”
Pompeo’s remarks in Cairo, delivered as part of a broader speech about the U.S. role in the Middle East, focused in part on the notion that U.S. allies in the region need to unite to counter threats from Iran.
The address was a direct rebuke of former President Barack Obama’s policies in the Middle East, referencing multiple times a speech Obama delivered in Egypt in 2009 aimed at the Muslim world.
Though the former president was not mentioned by name, Pompeo ripped his attempts to engage Iran and his “penchant for wishful thinking” in approaching Middle East policy, accusing previous administrations of “misjudgments” that proved “dire,” and outlining what he said were the results of those miscalculations.
“In falsely seeing ourselves as a force for what ails the Middle East, we were timid about asserting ourselves when the times – and our partners – demanded it,” Pompeo argued Thursday, declaring that Trump’s presidency has brought to an end “age of self-inflicted American shame.”
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05.04.2025