When New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez announced that he would oppose Mike Pompeo’s nomination as US secretary of state, he explained that he would do so because Pompeo, then director of the CIA, had failed to disclose that he had traveled to North Korea over Easter weekend as US President Donald Trump’s envoy.
For Menendez, the audacity and secrecy of the Trump administration’s preparations for a planned summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was unacceptable.
“Now, I don’t expect diplomacy to be negotiated out in the open,” Menendez said in a recent speech, “but I do expect for someone who is the nominee to be Secretary of State, when he speaks with committee leadership and is asked specific questions about North Korea, to share some insights about such a visit. I believe our nation’s top diplomat must be forthright.”
Illustration: Yusha
The US constitution assigns senators the responsibility to confirm, by majority vote, the president’s Cabinet nominees. The US’ founders sought to ensure that individuals serving in high positions of public trust would be well qualified, not just in the judgment of a single individual, but after thoughtful review by the independently elected US Senate.
In exercising their constitutional duty, senators should consider carefully their criteria for providing what the constitution calls “advice and consent.” There are many good reasons why senators might decide to support or oppose Pompeo’s nomination, but Pompeo’s withholding of the fact that he was engaged in secret diplomacy is not one of them.
To be sure, despite being a mainstay of US foreign policy, secret diplomacy has always had its critics. Some argue that it is a type of deception that undermines the transparency and accountability on which US democracy is based. Others do not oppose secret diplomacy per se, but they believe that maintaining a reasonable degree of democratic accountability requires that a small subset of congressional leaders be informed.
In criticizing Pompeo for failing to be “forthright” even with the “committee leadership,” Menendez expressed both of these concerns.
Yet, the history of secret diplomacy, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, clearly illustrates its benefits. The most important diplomatic breakthrough of the Cold War, the opening to China, began with secret negotiations between Henry Kissinger, then former US president Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, and then-Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來). Kissinger’s top-secret trip to Beijing in 1971 laid the groundwork for Nixon’s historic visit the following year. The warming of Sino-US relations helped widen divisions between China and the US’ Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union.
Likewise, former US president Barack Obama’s signature diplomatic achievement, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, could not have been achieved without secret talks. In March 2013, Obama sent two senior State Department officials, William J. Burns and Jake Sullivan, to begin secret conversations with the Iranians in Oman. Given that diplomatic relations between the two countries had been severed for more than 30 years, and that each country was radioactive in the domestic politics of the other, holding preliminary negotiations in public would have been a non-starter.
Soon enough, the secret conversations led US officials to conclude that the Iranians were serious about entering into formal talks. In secret, US and Iranian negotiators worked on an outline of what would ultimately become the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which blocked all of Iran’s major pathways to becoming a nuclear power by preventing the country from reprocessing plutonium or enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels. It also eliminated two-thirds of Iran’s centrifuges and 98 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium, and established the most intrusive verification and inspection regime ever negotiated.
However, as difficult as the talks with Iran were, negotiating with Kim’s “Hermit Kingdom” would be harder still. The US and North Korea are technically still at war, because a formal peace treaty has not been concluded since the 1950-1953 Korean War, which ended with a ceasefire and an armistice.
Moreover, every past denuclearization agreement between the two countries has collapsed, and since Trump took office, he and Kim have been lobbing insults and threats at each other. In this context, sending a secret envoy to Pyongyang to lay the groundwork for productive negotiations is precisely what the US should be doing.
Even so, there is still the question of why that envoy would not inform Senate foreign-policy leaders of his work, especially when he is seeking to become the US’ chief diplomat. One answer is that the Trump administration probably believes that informing the US Congress would make the secret negotiations no longer a secret.
During the past year’s investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia ahead of the 2016 US presidential election, Congress has leaked like a sieve, and many congressional Democrats have made it clear that they would “resist” Trump at every turn. Thus, it was reasonable for Pompeo to fear that knowledge of his secret talks would be leaked in an effort to undermine the summit and deny the administration a potential political victory.
Transparency and accountability are still important US norms, but the history of US diplomacy has shown that secrecy often is essential for success. Besides, the constitution gives the president wide latitude in foreign policy. That is why even some of Menendez’s Democratic colleagues, who might oppose Pompeo on policy grounds, cheered the news of his visit to North Korea.
As Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy put it, “I’ll just be honest with you, I’m glad there is someone at a high level in the Trump administration talking to the North Koreans about what may be the parameters of this meeting.”
Murphy is right. There are valid reasons to oppose a nominee for Secretary of State, but a failure to disclose secret preparatory talks for the most important presidential summit of the century is not one of them.
Graham Allison is professor of government and former director of the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) reach the point of confidence that they can start and win a war to destroy the democratic culture on Taiwan, any future decision to do so may likely be directly affected by the CCP’s ability to promote wars on the Korean Peninsula, in Europe, or, as most recently, on the Indian subcontinent. It stands to reason that the Trump Administration’s success early on May 10 to convince India and Pakistan to deescalate their four-day conventional military conflict, assessed to be close to a nuclear weapons exchange, also served to
China on May 23, 1951, imposed the so-called “17-Point Agreement” to formally annex Tibet. In March, China in its 18th White Paper misleadingly said it laid “firm foundations for the region’s human rights cause.” The agreement is invalid in international law, because it was signed under threat. Ngapo Ngawang Jigme, head of the Tibetan delegation sent to China for peace negotiations, was not authorized to sign the agreement on behalf of the Tibetan government and the delegation was made to sign it under duress. After seven decades, Tibet remains intact and there is global outpouring of sympathy for Tibetans. This realization
After India’s punitive precision strikes targeting what New Delhi called nine terrorist sites inside Pakistan, reactions poured in from governments around the world. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) issued a statement on May 10, opposing terrorism and expressing concern about the growing tensions between India and Pakistan. The statement noticeably expressed support for the Indian government’s right to maintain its national security and act against terrorists. The ministry said that it “works closely with democratic partners worldwide in staunch opposition to international terrorism” and expressed “firm support for all legitimate and necessary actions taken by the government of India
The recent aerial clash between Pakistan and India offers a glimpse of how China is narrowing the gap in military airpower with the US. It is a warning not just for Washington, but for Taipei, too. Claims from both sides remain contested, but a broader picture is emerging among experts who track China’s air force and fighter jet development: Beijing’s defense systems are growing increasingly credible. Pakistan said its deployment of Chinese-manufactured J-10C fighters downed multiple Indian aircraft, although New Delhi denies this. There are caveats: Even if Islamabad’s claims are accurate, Beijing’s equipment does not offer a direct comparison
RSS