In recent days, one aide to President Donald Trump has blitzed the media to talk about troop deployments, deterrence and the likelihood of American bombs raining down on Iranian soil.
It’s not the man who leads the Pentagon.

Instead, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has seized the spotlight amid the escalating U.S. confrontation with Iran. As he’s done so, he’s come across to some observers as an unofficial secretary of defense, overshadowing the actual defense secretary.

Pompeo’s omnipresence illustrates the extraordinary influence he wields in Trump’s inner circle three years into the Republican president’s tenure.

His prestige within the administration has been enhanced by multiple leadership changes at the Pentagon and National Security Council. It has continued despite questions about his role in the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s impeachment, and amid questions about his political aspirations. And it has raised eyebrows at the Defense Department, which is led by Mark Esper, a former West Point classmate of Pompeo’s who has kept a relatively low profile in his six months on the job.

Pompeo is “first among equals in the national security team, and others defer to him,” said Tom Wright, a Brookings Institution scholar who has been tracking the Trump team’s dynamics. “He doesn’t have a competing center of power.”

Pompeo appeared on all the major talk shows on Sunday to field a slew of tough questions about the Trump administration’s decision to kill Qassem Soleimani, a powerful Iranian general that U.S. officials blame for attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and terrorist operations elsewhere around the world.


A long-time Iran hawk, Pompeo fiercely defended the strike, which took out Soleimani as he was visiting Baghdad, even as it has led to vows of Iranian revenge and calls from Iraqi politicians for U.S. forces to withdraw. Pompeo, who graduated first in the class of 1986 at West Point, sounded more like a swaggering military leader than America’s top diplomat.

“We took a bad guy off the battlefield. We made the right decision. There is less risk today to American forces in the region as a result of that attack,” Pompeo said while on CNN’s State of the Union.
“Previous administrations had allowed Shiite militias to take shots at us, and at best, we responded in theater, trying to challenge and attack everybody who was running around with an AK-47 or a piece of indirect artillery,” he said on ABC’s This Week. “We’ve made a very different approach.”

Neither the State Department nor the Defense Department responded to requests for comment for this story.

Pompeo’s visibility, however, has been all the more glaring because of Esper’s near invisibility amid the crisis.

The secretary of defense did make one important appearance: On Thursday, hours ahead of the strike on Soleimani, Esper told reporters the U.S. “will take preemptive action as well to protect American forces,” warning Iran that “the game has changed.”

And he popped up on Monday to clarify that U.S. troops were not planning to leave Iraq, despite a letter suggesting otherwise from an American general in Iraq.

But Esper, who served in the 101st Airborne Division during the first Gulf War, has largely vanished from sight otherwise.

Given the dangerous situation in the Middle East now, his absence has led to griping among some military reporters, who’ve also long complained about the dearth of press briefings at the Pentagon.

Former military officials and others who track the Defense Department say that Esper appears to have made the calculation that it’s best to stay behind the scenes in an administration where few people have Trump’s ear, and where anything you say could be easily undermined by a presidential tweet moments later.

Plus, Esper, a former Capitol Hill staffer and lobbyist for defense contractor Raytheon, took over as defense secretary with a thinner executive branch resume than many who’ve held the position in the past. And while he can point to his time as an infantry officer and at West Point, some Pentagon watchers wonder if even that is helping Pompeo overshadow him.

Several people from the 1986 West Point class hold key administration positions. Because he was first in that class, Pentagon observers say it’s possible that others from the 1986 crew at West Point take a back seat to Pompeo.

“The worry at the Pentagon is that [Esper] defers to Pompeo,” said Mark Perry, author of “The Pentagon's Wars: The Military's Undeclared War Against America's Presidents.” He said there were other reasons for that beyond the West Point dynamics, including that “Pompeo has the president’s ear and Esper doesn’t.”



Pompeo is one of the few Trump aides able to deal with tough media questions without showing any personal differences with the president – even if that means his answers are sometimes misleading. And Trump clearly trusts him; the pair regularly meet for lunch and Trump has said Pompeo is one of the rare people with whom he never disagrees.

“I argue with everyone,” he said in an account in New York magazine. “Except Pompeo... I don’t think I’ve had an argument with Pompeo!”

A senior administration official noted that it was the White House that requested Pompeo appear on the Sunday shows. Given that Pompeo is passionate about the issue of Iran – U.S. diplomats say he gets deep into the weeds on the topic – he requires little prep work.

But the latest Iran crisis isn’t the first time Pompeo’s actions have startled Pentagon officials.

On June 18, in an unusual move for a secretary of State, Pompeo traveled to Florida to meet with leaders of U.S. Central Command and Special Operations command. The meetings focused in part on Iran, which the U.S. was accusing of attacking international oil tankers.

But the visit also came the same day the president withdrew the nomination of then-Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan to serve in the role on a permanent basis.

Shanahan’s nomination was shelved after some family troubles came to light. His withdrawal was another low point for the Pentagon, which had already seen James Mattis quit as defense secretary after the president in late 2018 ordered the withdrawal of troops from Syria.

Pompeo said the purpose of his Florida visit was to “make sure that the State Department and the Department of Defense were deeply coordinated across a whole broad range of issues.” But, according to Perry, the visit “still roils” some military officials.

And while he was in Florida, some in the foreign policy establishment in Washington wondered if he was auditioning to be the next secretary of defense. (Pompeo’s first job with Trump was as CIA director.)

Even at the State Department, Pompeo, who served as an Army cavalry officer after West Point, often takes a military-style approach. He refers to his diplomats’ having a “mission set” and tells his “team” to “keep crushing it.”

People who know him say his military training appears to influence his willingness to defend Trump in public and implement whatever the president – the commander-in-chief – wants.

In his first major address to his workforce after he became secretary of State in 2018, Pompeo raised the military concept of “commander’s intent” to in pledging to craft a vision for what he wanted to achieve. The concept describes the end-state a commander seeks so that his troops can do what they need to get there.

Some in the military world downplayed questions about whether, in staying below the radar, Esper and the Pentagon were ceding anything to Pompeo.

Pentagon officials are busy dealing with the technicalities of ramping up the U.S. troop presence in the Middle East amid threats of reprisals from Iran, after all, and Esper needs to focus more on that than public relations, they argued.

“It goes more to the relationship between Pompeo and Trump than any sort of emasculation of the Pentagon,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired U.S. army colonel. “The Pentagon leaders realize they need to stay under the radar and get on with their business.”


Pompeo’s willingness to be so public also might have to do with politics as much as policy.

He has been eying a run for Senate from Kansas, the state he used to represent as a Republican congressman, though he apparently ruled it out in a recent conversation with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

But getting face-time on national television could help raise his profile for in any future political endeavors, especially when he can sound tough on a country loathed by many in the GOP base.

“I’ve been with President Trump through the entire strategic planning process related to our entire campaign – diplomatic, economic, and military,” he said on CNN, adding later: “The American people should know that we will not waiver.”


Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine