Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s last overseas trip as top U.S. diplomat has been canceled, the State Department announced Tuesday that he should stay in Washington to prepare for the transition to the Biden government.
Pompeo was due to travel to Brussels on Wednesday for meetings with Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, and the Belgian foreign minister, Sophie Wilmès, but the state department canceled ‘all planned trips this week’.
The secretary’s brief European tour would initially include a stop in Luxembourg, but small NATO officials canceled the visit after last week’s pro-Trump riot at the US Capitol, according to three sources with knowledge of the decision.
In an interview with RFL on Thursday, Luxembourg’s Foreign Secretary Jean Asselborn called President Donald Trump ‘a criminal’ and ‘a political pyromaniac who must serve before the criminal court’. A Luxembourg government spokesman declined to comment.
The State Department’s public announcement of the trip, which was announced 24 hours before it was deducted, lists Belgium as Pompeo’s only destination.
Travel to Belgium by the top US diplomat would traditionally involve a meeting with EU leaders, as was often the case with Pompeo. According to two European and two US officials familiar with travel planning, no meetings with EU officials were planned yet.
America’s allies are united in their dismay at the violent scenes at the heart of American democracy, with some world leaders explicitly blaming Trump for inciting his supporters to storm the building. Both Stoltenberg and Wilmès described Wednesday’s violent attack on the Capitol as ‘shocking’, and reiterated the legitimacy of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
But the secretary’s meetings in Brussels were still going on this morning, the sources said, with some State Department officials already on the ground.
By Tuesday afternoon, Pompeo had called Stoltenberg to notify him that he would not be traveling again, a NATO official confirmed to NBC News. The officer who was not present at the call said the secretary was announcing the cancellation due to the necessary arrangements around the transition.
A visit to Taiwan by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft was also canceled as part of the travel department’s cancellation this week.
Craft would have been the first member of the Trump administration to meet with Taiwanese officials after Pompeo removed all restrictions on US-Taiwan relations this past weekend. The move has been heavily condemned by China, which sees Taiwan as an apostate province it must control.
Zhao Lijian, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, warned Pompeo at the time to “stop going further down the wrong and dangerous path”, otherwise he would be “severely punished by history”.
Abigail Williams and Josh Lederman reported from Washington, DC, and Carlo Angerer reported from Munich.
