Pompeo to Deliver R.N.C. Speech From Israel With Eye on 2024 – By Lara Jakes (The New York Times) / Aug 25 2020
WASHINGTON — In planning to address the Republican Party faithful on Tuesday night from one of the world’s holiest cities, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is betting that he has more to gain, politically, than he will lose by challenging decades of diplomatic decorum.
Pool photo by Debbie Hill For Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, bolstering Israel serves dual purposes: protecting America’s strongest ally in the volatile Middle East, and appealing to white evangelical voters.
Mr. Pompeo is scheduled to speak to the Republican National Convention in a pretaped speech from Jerusalem, with the lights of the Old City and its Jewish, Muslim and Christian shrines expected to be visible over his shoulder. It provides Mr. Pompeo with a vantage point to praise one of President Trump’s few foreign policy achievements that has received wide and bipartisan support: the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
It also gives him a national platform with Mr. Trump’s core supporters — a political base that Mr. Pompeo is courting as he weighs a future presidential campaign.
“If he has any interest in running for president in the future, this is a way of inserting himself into presidential politics, but at the cost of breaking an important tradition in American history,” said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian.
Continue to article: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/pompeo-to-deliver-r-n-c-speech-from-israel-with-eye-on-2024/ar-BB18mxbN
