Pompeo’s interview with The Wichita Eagle and The Kansas City Star encapsulates why he is such an awful Secretary of State:

Eagle: And what good really is the word of the U.S. in light of the president’s treatment of the Kurds? Has that undercut U.S. credibility?

Pompeo: The whole predicate of your question is insane. The word the United States– I’ll give you a good example– the word of the United States is much more respected today than it was just two and a half years ago.

There is a good answer to the question about credibility, but Pompeo is incapable of giving it. He can’t make the necessary distinctions between U.S. treaty allies and proxies, because he blurs those distinctions himself all the time. He can’t explain why the treatment of the YPG is different from U.S. relations with other states and groups because that would require him to acknowledge that the U.S. has indeed left them in the lurch. He also has to push the administration propaganda line that the U.S. is “much more respected” than before when the opposite is pretty clearly true. No matter what one thinks about Trump’s recent Syria decisions, no one can honestly say that “the word of the United States is much more respected today than it was just two and a half years ago.” Between all the agreements that Trump has reneged on and backed out of over the last two years and the sheer personal untrustworthiness of the president and his Secretary of State, there is no way this could be true. Pompeo’s penchant for fabrication and falsehood catches up with him here. The real credibility problem with this administration is that neither the president nor the Secretary of State can be counted on to tell the truth.

U.S. credibility with its treaty allies has not been harmed by recent events in Syria, but Pompeo can’t make a persuasive case of that because he is just as caught up in the cult of credibility as many of the administration’s hawkish critics are. Instead of explaining why U.S. credibility hasn’t been harmed because this is not how credibility works and it is not how others judge it, Pompeo launches into extended whining about Obama’s “red line” episode. His need to score partisan points against Obama and to shift the blame for everything he and Trump are doing to Obama is sad, and in this case it sabotages his own defense. If not attacking Syria over the “red line” was as terrible as Pompeo falsely claims, how much worse would that make what Trump has done? The smart defense of the administration’s position would be to argue that concerns about credibility are always overblown, but Pompeo is so preoccupied with pinning everything on Obama that he just makes a fool of himself. He can’t even deliver his answer without first disparaging the question as “insane,” because his first instinct when dealing with tough questions is to berate and insult the questioner. He’s an awful diplomat and a terrible spokesman for the United States, and he just proved it again in this interview.