Less than 24 hours after assuming his post, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plunged Friday into NATO diplomacy as the allies sought to toughen their response to Russian interference on its periphery and elsewhere.
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.
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