A NO-HOLDS-BARRED VIEW
It’s an American ritual, essential but with no guarantee of success: students write essays for college admission and politicians write autobiographies to signal presidential ambition. And so, Mike Pompeo, former US President Donald Trump’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director and Secretary of State, has written his book Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love.
It is a story in Pompeo’s telling of high achievement, of a Kansas Boy graduating first in class from West Point, Harvard Law School and being the longest-surviving senior member of the Trump administration, which he puts down to his selfless devotion to Trump. His ‘lick-up-and-kickdown’ approach endeared him to Trump, who called him ‘My Mike’. The cover of this 843-page biography has a much slimmed-down version of Pompeo with an uncanny resemblance to a vegan diet-induced Bill Clinton a decade after he left the presidency.
Pompeo says he has lived his life for Judeo-Christianity and American exceptionalism, a combination of which, he concludes in his book, will ensure that this will remain an ‘American Century’. For this to happen, he is prepared to take on, without giving an inch, his sworn enemies—which is almost the entire Democratic Party, the entire State Department, Beltway journos and think-tanks. There are many notables on the other side of the aisle. Laser focus is reserved for America’s enemies—China foremost, but also Iran, Russia, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and Venezuela. The rest of the world is divided into allies who are special—Israel, India, Japan, the UK and Saudi Arabia—and others who need to be corralled into falling in line with America.
Pompeo is a political gladiator. For him, public life—as CIA head or as top US diplomat—was a bloodsport. The book is thus an almanac of his victims’ blood gashes, delivered in pungent text—from Xi Jinping to Emmanuel Macron and Ashraf Ghani to Mohammad Javad Zarif, with John Brennan, John Bolton, Nikki Haley, Susan Rice, thrown in for good measure.
NEVER GIVE AN INCH: Fighting for the America I Love
Softer treatment is given to Russian President Vladimir Putin (he gets away with “funny and mirthful even if evil”), Sergey Lavrov and Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS. The book opens with Pompeo’s meeting with Kim Jong-un of the DPRK, on the issue of American hostages and denuclearisation, who weaves in and out through subsequent chapters. Trump would not have made Pompeo the State Secretary if not for his initial success with Kim, whose presence as the silent second hero in the book would be noted by many.
It may be a while before there is a coherent account of the tumultuous Trump presidency. Thus, this book is perhaps the closest we will get to an insider’s no-holds-barred account of the policy debates on issues where US actions had global implications—most significantly, on enshrining China as the primary global threat, rolling back the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Paris agreement, the policy in Afghanistan, the shakedown of NATO allies to pay more, and the downward spiral in relations with Russia leading up to the current Russia-Ukraine war. The Russian’s election interference ‘hoax’ is dealt with in detail.
India is included in the chapter dealing with US ‘allies’. The elevation of the Quad to ‘ministerial level’ (later to be at ‘summit level) is warmly applauded. India is seen as an indispensable but not-so-easy-to-please partner. Pompeo makes a brief mention of the tense moments in India-Pakistan relations of February 2019 involving a possible nuclear dimension—a rerun of the ‘go-run-to-daddy’ moment of previous bilateral crisis situations; he avers it was a false alarm.
Pompeo may want to be remembered as a heroic crusader for American primacy, especially by those voting in the 2024 US presidential election, if he is on the ballot. But the man who gave him the break of his life and to whom he was loyal to a fault may himself want to be on it. The bloodsport would then come full circle. ■
D.B. Venkatesh Varma is a former ambassador to Russia