President-elect Donald Trump, having secured a decisive return to the White House, began assembling his new team late Saturday, making his first official announcements about the composition of his emerging cabinet.

In a formal statement, Trump confirmed that neither Nikki Haley, his former UN Ambassador, nor Mike Pompeo, who served as Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021, will be returning to positions in the White House.

"I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our Country," the president-elect wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Haley, who mounted a significant challenge against Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries, ultimately withdrew from the race in March 2024 after Trump's commanding victory. Both Haley and Pompeo have maintained strong pro-Israel positions throughout their careers. Pompeo demonstrated this commitment by visiting Israel after the outbreak of the war in 2024, meeting with wounded soldiers and participating in a blood donation drive alongside his wife.

The potential return of Pompeo faced fierce opposition from some Trump loyalists. Media personality Alex Jones criticized the potential return of Pompeo, calling him untrustworthy and suggesting that Pompeo poses a personal threat to Trump and that Trump's handling of this situation will demonstrate his ability to identify and remove what Jones refers to as Deep State influences.

The intense criticism of Pompeo stems from his perceived cooperation with certain investigations targeting Trump. Similarly, Trump's trust in Haley eroded due to her extended primary challenge and her criticism of his statements in the lead-up to the election.

American media reports indicate three leading contenders for secretary of state: Robert O'Brien, Senator Bill Hagerty, and Senator Marco Rubio. For the position of US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who served in this role during Trump's first term and maintains a long-standing relationship with the president-elect, is being considered.

The final vote tallies, released four days after Trump's victory, confirmed his win in Arizona over Kamala Harris – completing his sweep of all swing states. The Arizona victory added 11 electoral votes to Trump's column, bringing his total to 312.

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Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday he will not enter the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

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In an interview with Fox News, the devoted ally and defender of Donald Trump opted out of a contest that would have put him into competition with his former commander in chief.

"The time is not right for me and my family," Pompeo said in a statement later posted to Twitter. "At each stage of my public service – as a soldier, as a member of the US House of Representatives, and then as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and as your Secretary of State – I've been blessed to have the opportunity to advance America in a way that fit the time and the moment. This is not that time or that moment for me to seek elected office again."

Pompeo seemed to leave the door open on a future run.

"To those of you this announcement disappoints, my apologies," Pompeo said. "And to those of you this thrilled, know that I'm 59 years old. There remain many more opportunities for which the timing might be more fitting as presidential leadership becomes even more necessary."

Pompeo would have been the second former Trump Cabinet member to enter the race to challenge the former president for the 2024 GOP nomination, joining former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who announced her campaign in February. Former Vice President Mike Pence is also considering entering the race and has stepped up his travel and activity in early-voting primary and caucus states.

In addition, biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson have also announced campaigns. US Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina has launched a presidential exploratory committee as he considers his own bid.

President Joe Biden has indicated he will seek reelection, tamping down any major challenges for the Democratic nomination.

Where Haley and Pence have openly expressed differences with Trump, Pompeo has had no public split with Trump and hasn't been rebuked by the former president, as many of his would-be rivals have. Pompeo recently referred to Trump as a "great boss."

The former congressman graduated at the top of his class from the US Military Academy in 1986 before spending five years on active duty, deployed for a time as a cavalry officer commanding tank movements along the border between NATO-backed Western Europe and Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe.

The retired Army captain is a Harvard-educated lawyer who practiced law in Washington and founded two Wichita businesses – an aerospace firm and later a petroleum equipment manufacturer – before entering politics.

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Pompeo – a witty and sometimes gruff politician – easily won four consecutive terms in the US House representing southern Kansas. He sat on the House Intelligence Committee as well as the select committee investigating the deadly 2012 attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya.

Pompeo counts as among his proudest moments the 2020 Abraham Accords, declarations of support for peaceful relations among Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. He also points to the imposition of tariffs on China, direct talks with North Korea and the US withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement as pillars of Trump's "America First" theme he helped erect.

The 2018 withdrawal from the Iran deal and imposition of crippling sanctions have prompted death threats against Pompeo, who remains under 24-hour security protection provided by the State Department.

In an exclusive interview with Israel Hayom in 2020, he criticized the past, saying, "What you can see is the failure of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to deliver on ensuring Iran could never have a nuclear weapon. We can see it now plain and simple. We know that the resources that were flowing as a result of the JCPOA, the billions of dollars that were flowing to the regime, enabled them to have the resources to do that, not only their terror campaign but to use it for research and development, we have seen this in their missile program. Our efforts have been to put pressure on the regime to change their behavior in ways that are consistent with their obligations to the international community."

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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is expected to offer details in his speech to the National Press Club in Washington on Tuesday on allegations that Iran has given safe haven to al-Qaida leaders and support for the group, sources familiar with the matter said, despite some skepticism within the intelligence community and Congress.

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It was not immediately clear how much Pompeo intends to reveal. He could cite declassified information on the killing of al-Qaida's suspected second-in-command in Tehran in August, said the sources, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The New York Times reported in November that Abu Muhammad al-Masri, accused of helping to mastermind the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa, was gunned down by Israeli operatives in Iran. Iran denied the report, saying there were no al-Qaida "terrorists" on its soil.

Iran has been a target throughout the Trump administration and Pompeo has sought to further ratchet up pressure on Iran in recent weeks with more sanctions and heated rhetoric.

Advisers to President-elect Joe Biden believe the Trump administration is trying to make it harder for him to re-engage with Iran and seek to rejoin an international deal on Iran's nuclear program.

Pompeo has accused Iran of links to al-Qaida in the past but has not provided concrete evidence.

"There have been times the Iranians have worked alongside al-Qaida," then CIA director Pompeo said in October 2017.

Earlier accusations by the George W. Bush administration of Iranian links to al-Qaida's Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States have been discredited. But reports have surfaced over the years of al-Qaida operatives hiding out in Iran.

A former senior US intelligence official with direct knowledge of the issue said the Iranians were never friendly with al-Qaida before or after the Sept. 11 attacks and any claims of current cooperation should be viewed warily.

Shi'ite Iran and al-Qaida, a Sunni Muslim militant organization, have long been sectarian foes.

Relations between Tehran and Washington have deteriorated since 2018 when Trump abandoned Iran's 2015 nuclear deal, which imposed strict curbs on its nuclear activities in return for the lifting of sanctions.

Since the beginning of his administration, Trump has imposed sanctions on Iranian officials, politicians and companies in an effort to force Tehran to negotiate a broader deal that further limits its nuclear work.

And more sanctions are expected before Trump leaves office, US officials say.

While sanctions have sharply lowered Tehran's oil exports and increased the economic hardship of ordinary Iranians, it has failed to bring Iran back to the negotiating table.

Biden has said the United States will rejoin the nuclear deal "if Iran resumes strict compliance."

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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted last Thursday that the US had the legal right to "snap back" UN sanctions. All the council members, except the Dominican Republic, informed the council president that the US administration's action was illegal because US President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal.

"In my view there is no consensus in the council," UNSC President Dian Triansyah Djani said. "Thus, the president is not in the position to take further action."

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Israel Hayom has also learned that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might meet with Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Mohammad bin Zayed prior to the signing ceremony.

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Israel hopes that direct talks with the Emiratis will kick off this week. Both sides have held preliminary talks, but most of the contact is still being handled through Washington. In Israel, a steering committee will coordinate all contacts, and the committee will include the members of a forum that met last week at the National Security Council to prepare for the start of direct negotiations.

That forum includes NSC head Meir Ben-Shabbat, Foreign Minister Director-General Alon Ushpiz, and senior officials from other government ministries. Israel and the Emirates have agreed to have teams of experts from each country discuss each of the areas included in the deal to establish bilateral relations.

One possibility difficulty will be to secure Saudi approval for Israeli use of its airspace. Israel plans to insist that any direct air route between Israel and the UAE will be open to Israeli airlines as well as Emirati ones, and expects the Emirates to pursued the Saudis to allow Israeli airlines to fly over it en route to the UAE.

At this point, Israel does not expect talks with the Emiratis to drag out, and hopes to see the deal signed, sealed, and delivered within a month.

One senior Israeli official noted that the US political timeline, with presidential elections at the start of November, demanded that agreements be reached quickly.

Another high-ranking official in Israel said that, unlike Israel's treaties with Egypt and Jordan, whose goal was to sign off on a shared vision for peace; when it comes to the United Arab Emirates the purpose of the agreement is to "create a process that will lead to broader and deeper bilateral relations and to cooperation in a number of fields. Then, [with Egypt and Jordan] the goal was the deal, whereas here the goal is normalization."

To help expedite the process, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is slated to visit Israel and the UAE this week, according to a report from the Al-Arabiyya news outlet.

Meanwhile, Suha Arafat, the widow of former PLO leader Yasser Arafat, published an apology to the Emirati people for the offense caused when Palestinian demonstrators in Jerusalem burned an Emirati flag and a picture of Crown Prince Bin Zayid during a protest against the agreement in Jerusalem.

The vandalism of the Emirati symbols, as well as the harsh criticism the Palestinians directed at the UAE leadership, as well as their calls for a boycott of an international expo scheduled to be held in Dubai next year, have infuriated the Emiratis, who see them as an example of ingratitude on the part of the Palestinians.

Arafat, who lives in Malta with her daughter, published the apology on her official Instagram account. Alongside a picture of the late Yasser with the founder of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed, she wrote: "In the name of the honorable people among the Palestinian people, I want to apologize to the Emirate people and their leadership for the offense and for burning the Emirati flag in Al-Quds [Jerusalem] and Palestine, as well as for desecrating Emirati state symbols."

Arafat wrote: "That is not part of our habits or traditions. Disagreements do not hurt the strong friendship between us. I am calling on our present generation to read history well, so they will know that the Emirates have supported the Palestinians and their problems in the past and in the present."

In a related development, media outlets in the UAE are attacking Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for his criticism of the Emirates. To point out his hypocrisy, the news outlets ran an expose of Erdogan's former foreign minister and current political rival, who said at a meeting of his new party that Erdogan was hiding the fact that after a trade of barbs with former Israeli President Shimon Peres after Operation Cast Lead, Ankara had issued an official apology to Peres.

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When Iran agreed to sanctions relief in return for curbs on its nuclear program, Tehran warned that it would no longer stick to the deal if any of the parties sparked a so-called snapback of sanctions at the UN Security Council, a backstop included in the accord in case Iran stopped complying.

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US President Donald Trump's administration plans this week to use that snapback provision, even though it quit the deal in 2018 and the move is opposed by the remaining parties to the accord – Germany, Britain, France, Russia, China and Iran.

But despite Tehran's declaration five years ago, three senior Iranian officials told Reuters that Iran's leadership is determined to remain committed to the nuclear deal, hoping that a victory by Trump's political rival Joe Biden in the Nov. 3 presidential election will salvage the pact.

"Right now the decision is to remain in the deal even if Americans make their biggest mistake of triggering the snapback mechanism," said a senior official, on condition of anonymity, who is involved in the discussions about Iran's nuclear policy.

"We will be still here, but Trump might not be at the White House in a few months," the official said.

Biden has said he would rejoin the nuclear deal, but only if Iran first returned to compliance. The accord was agreed by former US President Barack Obama's administration, when Biden was vice president.

A second Iranian official – a former nuclear negotiator – said Iran was "technically and politically" ready to quit.

"But we have to be smart and not to fall in the US trap which wants to push Iran out of the deal," said the official.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has described the next few weeks and months as critical for the nuclear deal.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was expected to travel to New York on Thursday to seek a return of all UN sanctions on Iran and meet with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, diplomats and a UN official said.

To trigger a return of the sanctions, the United States will submit a complaint to the 15-member UN Security Council about Iran's non-compliance with the nuclear deal, even though Washington quit the accord in 2018.

Pompeo will likely meet with Indonesia's UN Ambassador Dian Triansyah Djani, the Security Council president for August, to submit the complaint, diplomats said. Pompeo is also due to meet with Guterres, a UN official said.

In response to what Washington calls its "maximum pressure" campaign – a bid to get Iran to negotiate a new deal – Tehran has breached several central limits of the 2015 deal, including on its stock of enriched uranium.

But diplomats say the snapback process will be tough and messy as Russia, China and other countries on the Security Council challenge the legality of the US move given Washington itself is no longer complying with what Trump called "worst deal ever" and has imposed strong unilateral sanctions on Iran.

A European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the US move to spark a return of all UN sanctions would risk "destroying" the nuclear deal, but "it will be a completely contested procedure so the snapback will have no effect, it will not be recognized by others."

The United States argues it can trigger the return of the sanctions because it is still named as a participant to the nuclear deal in a 2015 UN Security Council resolution that enshrines the agreement.

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A second European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said "the overwhelming majority of the international community" believe the United States cannot trigger snapback.

Outgoing US Iran envoy Brian Hook said on Tuesday that the nuclear deal, while well intentioned, had failed to deter Iran.

"We have put in place enormous leverage for a [Trump] second term to get the kind of outcomes that we're going to need," he told a United Against Nuclear Iran think tank event.

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Pompeo said the 47-member-state forum's unanimous resolution on Friday on policing and race was a new low for the council and reaffirmed the United States' decision to withdraw from the organization in 2018.

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"The United Nations Human Rights Council, now comprised of Venezuela and recently, Cuba and China, has long been and remains a haven for dictators and democracies that indulge them," Pompeo said in a statement. "It is a grave disappointment to those genuinely seeking to advance human dignity."

The death of Floyd, a 46-year old Black man who died on May 25 after a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes, has led to widespread demonstrations in the United States and across the globe against police brutality and racial injustice. Pompeo said the civil discourse was a sign of the United States' democracy, strength, and maturity.

"If the Council were serious about protecting human rights, there are plenty of legitimate needs for its attention, such as the systemic racial disparities in places like Cuba, China, and Iran," he said.

"If the Council were honest, it would recognize the strengths of American democracy and urge authoritarian regimes around the world to model American democracy and to hold their nations to the same high standards of accountability and transparency that we Americans apply to ourselves."

The resolution adopted by the Human Rights Council was brought by African countries. Floyd's brother, Philonise Floyd, had urged the Council to investigate US police brutality and racial discrimination.

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Pompeo commented at a news conference where he was pressed on whether any such planned Iranian attacks were "imminent," the term that he had used on Friday, the day Soleimani was killed in Iraq.

"Is there any history that would indicate that it was remotely possible that this kind gentleman, this diplomat of great order – Qassem Soleimani – had traveled to Baghdad for the idea of conducting a peace mission?" he said. "We know that wasn't true."

Pompeo also held Soleimani responsible for a Dec. 27 rocket attack in Iraq in which a US civilian contractor was killed.

"He was continuing the terror campaign in the region. We know what happened ... in December, ultimately leading to the death of an American. So, if you are looking for imminence, you need to look no further than the days that led up to the strike that was taken against Soleimani," Pompeo said.

"And then you in addition to that have what we could clearly see were continuing efforts on behalf of this terrorist to build out a network of campaign activities that were going to lead, potentially, to the death of many more Americans," he added.

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Indeed, recently 107 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Pompeo expressing "strong disagreement" with the State Department's new policy and urged Pompeo to "reverse this policy decision immediately."

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Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said that Pompeo "did a great service for Israel and for truth by stating that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are not illegal."

"And it is unfortunate," he added, "that there are some members of Congress who want to second guess him," referring to the Democratic lawmaker's letter. For his part, Gold sent a letter to each of those lawmakers explaining why Pompeo's decision was correct.

The change in policy was allegedly timed to counter the European Union's decision to label goods made in Judea and Samaria, as well as to reverse the previous administration's stance, which viewed the settlements not only as an obstacle to peace but actually illegal.

As such, how subjective is international law and could the decision be reversed by a future president, especially a Democrat?

Gold said that the Trump administration's view of settlements helped to provide a different interpretation of international law.

"I thought it was very important to put on the table the issue of the improper application of the Fourth Geneva Convention in the case of Israel," Gold said. "International law is a subject where people do interpret way of norms differently. That is simply the way it works."

He added that the decision made during former-President Jimmy Carter's administration to declare the settlements a violation of international law "was wrongheaded."

Taking it a few steps further, Gold said the basis of claiming that the settlements are illegal came from the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which said that a state occupying territory in war cannot move the population out of the occupied territory, and, secondly, that it cannot move its own population into the territory in question.

"In Israel's case," he said, "both statements are irrelevant."

What has bothered him, in particular, was that the idea that an occupying power cannot move its population into occupied territory came from the actions of Nazi Germany, which moved its Jewish population into places like Poland for purposes of extermination.

"So somebody has the nerve to say that Israelis who have voluntarily moved into the West Bank are violating an international law that was based on a completely different situation?" he asked incredulously. "Comparing what Israel does in the West Bank to what Nazi Germany did in Poland to the Jews of Germany is something I find repulsive."

Gold said he felt it was important to send the letters because "if you don't say anything, it will continue."

'A solution on how to move forward'

Pnina Sharvit-Baruch of the Institute for National Security Studies said it is necessary to move away from the arguments over who is right or wrong, and instead to "find a solution on how to move forward."

She said she fears that a future US Democrat administration might not just go back to the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush kind of ambiguity when they said settlements are "an obstacle to peace." Instead, it might return to the Obama policy of saying settlements are illegal.

Since international law is often interpreted differently, are people simply propagating their own subjective views?

"Almost any legal question is often the issue of different interpretations," said Sharvit-Baruch, "and settlements are no different than any other legal question, especially with regard to international law."

"An argument can be made – and it is not baseless to say – that the settlements are not necessarily illegal," she said. "The case of why Palestinians have a right to this territory is not a clear-cut question. Even if they have the right of determination, there is still no clear-cut legal answer as to what territory this right applies to because the Green Line of 1967 is not a border."

She said the main point is that the two sides, and even the wider Arab world, previously agreed that the topic of settlements and borders is an issue that needs to be negotiated and that it is not supposed to be determined in court.

Sharvit-Baruch said that by declaring the settlements a violation of international law, the Obama and Carter administrations were "very unhelpful."

"Those who insist on discussing it in legal terms," she emphasized, "are doing a disservice to any kind of peaceful settlement to the conflict."

 Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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