Why Did Mike Pompeo Write This Book?

• Author: Theros, Patrick Nickolas
• Position: Mike Pompeo's "Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love"

Never Give an Inch had been perceived as a precursor to a presidential bid. Now, it looks like a vice presidential job application submitted to Donald Trump.

Politicians with presidential ambitions often kick off their campaign by publishing a book telling their life story and laying out why they deserve to be the leader of the free world. Mike Pompeo's 400-plus page contribution to the genre is a little different, which may explain why he announced that he would not run for president three months after it was published.

Pompeo chronicles his four years working with President Donald Trump, defending Trump's foreign policy record and touting his own contributions to it. Pompeo has almost nothing critical to say about his former boss. Never Give an Inch feels less like a presidential campaign book than a vice presidential job application.

Vice presidents are often attack dogs, and Pompeo appears to be auditioning for that role. His memoir is a furious, judgmental screed, perfectly calibrated to please the conservative Christians who dominate Trump's political base. He attacks those whom he sees as foreign and domestic enemies of America. He directs a fire hose of vitriol at former President Barack Obama, a slew of former Obama administration officials, the U.S. Foreign Service, and even some former Trump aides, including John Bolton, a vocal Trump critic who might also run for president, and Steve Bannon, whom Trump fired early on in his presidency but who remains in the Trump orbit.

Pompeo views the world in Hobbesian terms that Trump would probably appreciate, repeatedly describing the world as a "mean, nasty place." He argues that the Trump administration inherited a disastrous international situation concocted by fools and knaves, requiring a divinely inspired "America First" foreign policy that combines a hard calculation of American interests with a Scripture-infused framework.

Pompeo's analysis of global events is not always wrong; he is justified, for example, in touting his own role in rebuilding U.S. relations with Greece and in criticizing Obama's hesitancy in enforcing his ill-conceived "red line" in Syria. Yet the book is far from a fair-minded assessment of America's foreign policy history.

Pompeo devotes the first dozen or so chapters to listing those whom he regards as disloyal or cowardly, or even as traitors to the United States and its values, including former FBI Director James Comey and current FBI Director Christopher...