Posted on 02/12/2019 4:44:55 PM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
Pompeo began his trip with a Monday stop at the statue of Ronald Reagan in Budapest’s Liberty Square, completed in 2011 to commemorate his administration’s stalwart opposition to the Soviets. Then, on Tuesday morning in Bratislava, the secretary of state visited the Gate of Freedom memorial at Slovakia’s Austrian border. He ended the day with a meeting with Poland’s foreign minister, Jakub Czaputowicz.
At every stop, Pompeo reminded his audience of U.S. and international reporters of the grim legacy of Soviet Communism while paying tribute to his host countries, which, he said, “cast off the Soviet yoke.” At the Gate of Freedom memorial, which commemorates the hundreds of Slovaks who were killed attempting to cross over the junction of the Morava and Danube rivers and into independent Austria, Pompeo met with five former political prisoners. “Where barbed wire and armed guards once stood, today people, goods, and information cross freely,” he said. He is the first secretary of state to visit the country since 1999.
"Democracy is hard,” he said during a conversation with the president of a Slovak think tank. “It’s boisterous, it’s contentious, people have different views. Boy, it’s different in Russia.”
If that’s the line, then Pompeo is staying on message. At his meeting with the Polish foreign minister, he reiterated that a state’s cooperation with Chinese telecom company Huawei would pose a threat to its relations with the U.S. But his comments on Russian president Vladimir Putin were perhaps his most pointed of the day: “Let me assure you that Vladimir Putin is intent on undermining democracies throughout the world. Make no mistake about it.”
Reengagement in Central Europe was broadly in line with the Trump administration’s strategic objectives, he said, which include beating back Chinese and Russian attempts to expand their sphere of influence.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Is doing business equals aggression nowadays and worth building another iron curtain to fix it? Yep, it would improve everything. /s Long live free enterprise! :)
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