One would think that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would be sharpening the battered international image of the United States after his boss encouraged a crowd that stormed the Capitol in an attempt to oust the result of the previous election to reverse and leave five dead.
But America’s leading foreign policy official has more urgent matters to address. In addition to boosting his reputation with a barrage of more than 200 self-congratulatory tweets, he spends his last days in office throwing diplomatic banana peels in the way of his successors by formally, but oh, so falsely, calling him foreign actors he does not like, as terrorists.
Unfortunately, Pompeo’s efforts to keep it at the Biden administration will cost millions of civilians hard and completely unnecessary costs. Although ultimately reversible, the policy will inflict collateral damage on innocent people while the process of reviewing the month to end the termination
Pompeo on Sunday began designating the Houthis, a rebel group that controls large parts of Yemen, as a ‘foreign terrorist organization’. On Monday, he followed suit by designating Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.
The most shameful of Pompeo’s actions is against Cuba. Yes, the country systematically suppresses political differences and has a poor human rights record, and it is associated with countries that are bad with Washington, especially Venezuela. But this is simply not the same as sponsoring terrorism.
The technicality that Pompeo relies on accusing terrorism is particularly great. In 2018, Cuba agreed to a request from the Colombian government to provide safe haven and passage for leaders of the ELN, a Marxist guerrilla group in Colombia designated by the US and others as a terrorist organization, so that they can hold peace talks with Bogotá could perform. But after the ELN took responsibility in January 2019 for a deadly bomb attack on a police academy, a new Colombian government asked Cuba to abandon its promise of safe passage and hand over the ELN leaders for trial, which Havana refused to do so.
Not only is Cuba’s refusal to breach a safe haven insurance for peace talks not far from sponsoring terrorist attacks, but the US gave other countries similar space years ago – allowing Qatar to secure a haven for the Taliban leaders offer to hold peace talks with the US despite ongoing attacks on US forces.
Pompeo’s announcement also cites Cuba’s refusal to extradite violent radicals from the 1970s and renounce its relationship with Venezuela as justifications. But do these grievances meet the criteria to “repeatedly support acts of international terrorism” in any contemporary sense?
The abuse of terrorism designation is widely seen as a political handout for Cuban-American runners who boosted President Donald Trump’s victory in Florida in November. But the designation of terrorism will primarily harm Cuba’s tourism-oriented economy by hampering economic relations with other countries that may violate U.S. law due to Cuba’s handling. It will succeed in harming ordinary Cubans, but not the government.
Pompeo’s decision a day earlier to designate Yemen’s Houthi rebels as a foreign terrorist organization is superficially more defensible – but actually more fundamentally flawed, because it threatens serious consequences than Cuba’s policies.
The Houthi rebels, who control the majority of Yemen’s population centers, including the capital of Sanaa, are undeniably a violent group. They took control of a large part of the country in 2015 and are now fighting with Saudi forces and Yemeni factions seeking to restore the former government, receiving a moderate amount of material support from Iran in their military ventures.
In this war-related context, the Houthis launched attacks on targets in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (which mostly bowed out of the conflict in 2019). However, they did not launch any significant attacks on the US or its closest ally Israel.
The definition for a foreign terrorist organization states that the country or group had to carry out or intend to carry out politically motivated attacks on non-competitors that threaten American interests. While civilians from Houthi missiles have indiscriminately killed civilians, this is true on a much larger scale of Saudi airstrikes – which have killed thousands of Yemeni civilians – while backing President Barack Obama and then Trump.
The designation of the terrorist group is undoubtedly intended as a gift for a farewell to a country that Trump still considers a loyal partner, as well as a way to intensify the pressure on Iran through the increasingly open support for the Houthi’s. as aid to terrorists – which could help Biden’s already difficult project to revive the nuclear deal with Iran that ended Trump.
To be sure, the Houthi are guilty of indiscriminate and cruel acts. But by designating a rebel army with purely regional goals as an international terrorist group, Pompeo is inciting a humanitarian crisis that will most strongly affect the more than 16 million Yemeni citizens living in areas controlled by the Houthi .
This is because the designation of terrorism potentially makes humanitarian aid programs punishable for the delivery of food and medical aid to those areas, with potentially devastating consequences for the 80 percent of Yemen’s people who depend on humanitarian aid. Although Pompeo has indicated that the legal capacity of the designation will not be used against humanitarian groups, legal protection for aid programs has not been cut short in Pompeo’s rush to carry out the designation of terrorism.
Pompeo knows that this decision will cause a mess that its successor will have to clean up, because the Trump administration decided two years earlier not to apply such a designation for fear that it would impede the delivery of aid.
And no matter, decades of US sanctions against Cuba and years of war in Yemen must have long since shattered illusions that they would force Havana or the Houthi’s additional disapproval to leave.
The damage from this irresponsible move unfortunately extends beyond Cuba and Yemen. Pompeo’s blatant abuse of the term “terrorism” also weakens the application of the term to states and groups that indisputably carry out terrorist activities. After all, the alleged moral authority that drives the list, and its compliance by foreign companies, can evaporate if its powers are used lightly against states and armed groups that do not fit the bill.
Fortunately, the Biden administration – and in both cases almost certainly – can stop Pompeo’s last-minute directions. However, it will require a controversial and time-consuming review process that will unnecessarily consume tax dollars and political capital.
This, of course, suits Pompeo and Trump very well, as it will create new opportunities to arouse indignation against Biden and advance the works of his foreign policy agenda. But that does not make these acts of “diplomatic vandalism” against American foreign policy any less deliberate or childish.