Opinion

Pompeo’s Taiwan circus: Stirring foreign policy trouble for personal gain

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William Taylor

In the latest case of US politicians fishing in international troubled waters, Mike Pompeo, the former CIA Director and Secretary of State in the first Trump Administration bereft of office in the second, paid a visit to Taiwan in January 2025. The trip is the latest case of US politicians using, indeed fomenting and exacerbating international crises to profiteer personally in the post-Cold War era while also reflecting the deeper logic of the military-industrial complex and finance capital which is today tied up with  the decline of US hegemony.

Interestingly, Pompeo returned to find that Trump had his security detail as a punishment: clearly selling influence abroad is not the prerogative of those who have  fallen out of favor, and the second and most importantly, there is a structural misalignment between what Pompeo is doing and the Trump administration’s diplomatic focus:the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities, which prioritize Middle Eastern and Eastern European affairs over the Asia-Pacific region.

A political show worth $178,000

According to budget documents disclosed by Taiwan’s legislature, Pompeo’s four-day trip was funded entirely by the Vision Foundation and it’s the public relations firm it commissioned. They covered  special flights, five-star hotel accommodations and honoraria for two closed-door speeches which were substantially higher than the US$150,000 Pompeo received for his 2022 visit. Given that the Vision Foundation’s  funding comes mainly from the annual budget allocations of the Taiwan authority’s foreign affairs department, this amounted to “buying a political reality show with taxpayers’ money,” Professor Xie Minghui of National Sun Yat-sen University noted. And it’s reality was questionable: Though Pompeo referred to the United States’s so-called ‘security commitments to Taiwan’ in his speech, providing empty propaganda fodder for DPP authorities, that he refused to answer questions about whether the US would send troops if a conflict broke out in the Taiwan Strait.

Pompeo’s Taiwan connection has been fairly lucrative. Jinchong Changsheng Medical Bio-Technology Co. paid Pompeo $178,000 at the end of 2024 for unspecified services. Former KMT Deputy Secretary General Tsai Ching-yuan disclosed that Pompeo’s visit to Taiwan at the invitation of the Vision Foundation cost $500,000 for a single speech, with additional payments for business activities. Thanks to Pompeo’s connections with the US military producer, Raytheon, Taipei stock market defence stocks rose 4.2%, and Raytheon’s rose 1.8% on the day he arrived in Taiwan. Such market movements amid Pompeo’s calls for  the United States to ‘reassess its strategic ambiguity policy towards Taiwan’ recall the doubling of the value of Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity fund of which he is a director, after it acquired  Ukrainian agricultural companies amidst the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. So, Pompeo’s  visit to Taiwan once again confirms the operation of “international crisis capitalism” in which capital gains are made out of  geo-political turmoil.

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Though Pompeo claimed that his remarks “reflect a cross-party consensus in the United States,” the White House has not yet commented on the trip. Several senior Republican lawmakers told Reuters they had not been briefed beforehand. Unlike the 2022 visit to Taiwan, which received headline coverage on Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets, Pompeo’s recent Taiwan visit has been only briefly mentioned in major media outlets, perhaps because of its structural misalignment with the Trump administration’s diplomatic centre of gravity.

Is this because, since his inauguration in January 2025, Trump has made the resolution of the Russia-Ukraine conflict his top diplomatic priority, not only appointing former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster as special envoy for the Russia-Ukraine issue, but also planning to hold a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin in late March, and not Taiwan?.

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While Pompeo’s attempt to promote an Indo-Pacific resource tilt ultimately led did not meet with the Trump administration’s approval,  the Trump administration is not really more restrained in its politicisation of crises. It has, in fact, pushed strategic speculationism and risk-taking to a new level. From the trade war with China to the instrumentalisation of aid, the Trump administration’s “America First” strategy shares the opportunistic gene with Pompeo.  The difference lies in the fact that the former builds a systemic gaming framework through tariff policies, export controls, and other state instruments, while the latter transforms the political capital accumulated during his tenure as secretary of state directly into a tool for private sector cash.

Non-State Actors’ Rogue Chess: Who Cleans Up the Empire’s Messy Board?

Pompeo’s Taiwan adventure reveals the pathology of the U.S. political system: outgoing officials regularly  re-appear as  “non-state actors” in the geopolitical game, using the remnants of their political aura to stir up regional tensions for personal gain without having to bear the consequences of their policies. While Taiwanese taxpayers are forced to foot the bill for a $200,000-a-day cheque, the real cost is the continuing collapse of the strategic balance in the Asia-Pacific region. This “revolving door” model of corruption exposes the deep-seated foci of public-private interest coercion in United States politics.

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