Two former secretaries of state—Democrat John Kerry and Republican Mike Pompeo—offered vastly different views on the war with Iran, responding to climate change, and other topics during a Dartmouth Political Union debate at Dartmouth.
The April 13 event in the ballroom of the Hanover Inn drew more than 300 students and community members, and more than 500 have watched the livestream.
Both Kerry and Pompeo, who spent time with students earlier in the day, highlighted the ability of a secretary of state to impact the world for good.
“Being secretary, I think, is in many ways a more advantageous job than being president,” said Kerry, who narrowly lost to President George W. Bush in 2004. “You don’t have to do all the politics, you don’t have to go out and raise money, you don’t have to put up with people you don’t want to put up with, and in the end, you really can make things happen.”
“Picking up that telephone on the seventh floor of the State Department empowers you to save people’s lives, to change the direction of the war, to begin to get a ceasefire. You do all these wonderful things that are available to you.”
Pompeo agreed.
“We were both blessed. We were foreign ministers from the United States of America,” Pompeo said. “Every world leader wants to meet with the American secretary of state. They didn’t want to meet with Mike. They wanted to meet with the nation that could do so much good for them and for their people.”
Both men have extensive military, academic, and government backgrounds.
Pompeo graduated first in his class from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1986 and served as a cavalry officer in the U.S. Army. He went on to graduate from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Pompeo spent nearly a decade leading two manufacturing businesses in Kansas and served four terms in the U.S. House. In President Donald Trump’s first term, he was CIA director from 2017-2018 and then served as secretary of state from 2018-2021.
While serving in the U.S. Navy, Kerry completed two combat tours of duty in Vietnam, receiving a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Combat V, and three Purple Hearts. He earned an undergraduate degree from Yale University and a law degree from Boston College Law School. Kerry represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate from 1985 to 2013, then served as secretary of state in the Obama administration from 2013 to 2017. President Joe Biden named Kerry the nation’s first special presidential envoy for climate in 2021.
The U.S. war with Iran dominated much of the hour-long discussion. Kerry and Pompeo differed on the need for the airstrikes the United States and Israel launched on Feb. 28.
Pompeo defended the Trump administration’s 2018 departure from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a 2015 accord designed to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for significant sanctions relief. He also praised Trump for doing what previous presidential administrations failed to do and take action against Iran, which he and Kerry agreed has been a source of constant chaos in the Middle East since the Islamic revolution there in 1979.
“The model that the JCPOA rested upon was a model that suggested that the Iranians would actually comply with something they signed up for,” Pompeo said.
“The Iran that I have known from afar, when I studied as a member of Congress, saw it as a CIA director, and then a secretary of state—they never once lived up to any of the commitments that they made in any material way,” Pompeo said. “Their determination, even according to their current deputy prime minister, was that they were trying to build a nuclear weapon.”
Kerry agreed with much of Pompeo’s assessment of Iran but strongly defended the nuclear accord that he helped negotiate as secretary of state. He said U.S. government agencies, Russia, China, European allies, and Israel all agreed that the JCPOA was achieving its intended goal of keeping Iran’s efforts to obtain a nuclear weapon in check at the time Trump pulled out of the agreement.
“Nothing we did in this agreement was based on trust,” Kerry said. “Some people said, Reagan said, ‘Trust and verify.’ We said, ‘Don’t trust, and verify.’ And we built up the strongest regime possible for how you hold them accountable. If they did cheat, we could slap all the sanctions back. We could go bomb them, and it would be better to have them shown to the world to be breaching it, and then come to the world and say, ‘We have to go to war,’ than to go to war when we’re the ones who pulled out.”
“So we really changed this whole dynamic with Iran, in my judgment, for the worse,” Kerry said of Trump’s actions, “and now we’re living with it today.”
They also disagreed about the merits of the Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change adopted in 2015 by the United States and 194 other nations.
Pompeo said he supports a clean, safe environment, but that such agreements are useless if other countries do not voluntarily comply and without an enforcement mechanism.
“I don’t think there’s a single industrialized nation that has made its climate objectives that it committed to in the original Paris Climate Accords, and we’re the only ones, I think, that have withdrawn,” Pompeo said. “They’re all still members. They’ve all agreed to it.”
“It’s not useful for the United States to sacrifice so much when you don’t have other partners that are willing in return to actually achieve those objectives.”
Kerry disagreed, noting the water temperature at one point in recent years had hit 101 degrees Fahrenheit off the coast of Florida, making the ocean more acidic. He said insurance companies there and in other states are denying home coverage because of the impacts from climate change, and that rising temperatures in places such as Africa will force people to flee to Europe and elsewhere to survive.
“(Trump) says it’s a hoax, but thousands of scientists all around the world will tell you it’s not a hoax, it’s math, it’s physics, there’s some chemistry, some biology, but you can know exactly what is happening and why,” Kerry said.
“We’ve got to get off of this disinformation and lying and avoidance when things are clearly happening that we could affect. We can still win this battle, but we’ve got to get serious about it, and we’re not right now.”
Asked during a Q&A session about the use of artificial intelligence in warfare, both veterans agreed the technology will significantly alter combat operations and could save lives, but that humans still have to be involved in the use of AI.
The debate was co-sponsored by the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding through the Seth Hendon ’86 and Kathryn Dove-Hendon Fund for Dialogue, and was supported by Dartmouth Dialogues as well.
Kerry and Pompeo met earlier in the day with the Dickey Center’s War and Peace Fellows and had informal conversations with DPU members. They later had dinner with the DPU ambassadors and executive board.
One debate attendee, Aaron Chung ’28, said he got a lot out of the exchange of ideas.
“I thought it was a very helpful discourse, understanding each secretary’s perspective on foreign policy, especially when it comes to the Middle East as well as ways to deploy America’s power to the rest of the world,” Chung said.
