Pompeo Hits at Republicans Critical of US Assistance to Ukraine

Former U.S. Secretary of State and Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on March 3, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called out Republicans critical of U.S. assistance toward Ukraine amid its war with Russia.

During a May 17 event at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank where Pompeo is a distinguished fellow, the man who served under former President Donald Trump as the nation’s top diplomat took issue with those who say that helping Ukraine fight off Russia detracts from assisting Taiwan amid the threat from China.

Pompeo said that notion is “predicated” on “a falsity of a zero-sum game that we can only have so many artillery rounds.” He acknowledged that the number cannot be “infinite,” but he said that the issue comes down to production by the industrial-military complex. Pompeo said the matter would exist even without the Russia-Ukraine war.

He lamented that the Trump administration did not “begin to address the scope and scale of the shallowness of the industrial base to actually build a deterrent model that would be respected by [Chinese President] Xi Jinping.”

Pompeo also said that Xi is looking at what is happening in Ukraine as a way to determine whether to invade Taiwan.

He sympathized with those who want to put American interests first and acknowledged the isolationists in the GOP.

However, he said, “What’s not fine is misunderstanding and just counting the cost” of what it would mean for the United States to not support Ukraine. While $25 billion-$30 billion in U.S. equipment to Ukraine is “real money,” said Pompeo, “the cost, had we not done that, would be multiples of that.

“And the cost of failure, the cost of Vladimir Putin sitting not just in Kyiv but in Warsaw would be ... bad for Americans, for every American family. And that’s what they miss. They get the liability side of the balance sheet, but they forget the enormous benefit of American leadership in the world.”

GOP critics of the billions of dollars in U.S. assistance to Ukraine include Elbridge Colby, an influential voice in Republican foreign policy circles, and Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

“The fact is that our concentration on Ukraine has undermined our ability to address the worsening military situation in Asia, especially around Taiwan. Advocates for unconditional support of Ukraine say that these two objectives are not in tension. Yet this is simply not borne out by the facts,” wrote Elbridge and Roberts in TIME in March.

“This is the real world, one in which American largesse is not unlimited, not the one we might wish it to be. In this world, America must focus on China and deterring war over Taiwan,” they added.