On his first overseas trip as America's top diplomat, Pompeo hit the ground running with a series of meetings at NATO headquarters in Brussels aimed at underscoring the alliance's relevance in a crisis-filled global environment that includes persistent or worsening conflicts in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
Pompeo's aim is to ensure that NATO maintains a unified position of "no business as usual" with Russia until it implements an agreement to end violence in eastern Ukraine and halts destabilizing actions for which it is blamed elsewhere, according to a senior U.S. official, ABC News reports.
At a breakfast meeting focused on Russia, NATO foreign ministers agreed on "the scale of Russian aggression" and that it "requires a response," according to the U.S. official, who was not authorized to discuss the closed-door meeting publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Read alsoSenate confirms Mike Pompeo as Trump's second secretary of state"We are in a situation where we've not been before," Stoltenberg said after the meeting. "We're not in the old Cold War, but we're neither in the strategic partnership we were trying to build after the Cold War. So this is something new. Therefore it's even more important that we are able to combine, both to be strong and to have a clear position of unity in our approach to Russia but at the same time to keep the channels for dialogue open."
