Mike Pompeo

Mike Pompeo served as the 70th U.S. Secretary of State from April 2018 to January 2021 and as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from January 2017 to April 2018, making him one of the few individuals in American history to hold both of the most senior intelligence and diplomatic positions, and the Secretary of State during whose tenure the most consequential pro-Israel policy advances of the modern era were formally executed. Born December 30, 1963, in Orange, California, Pompeo graduated first in his class from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1986, served as a cavalry officer in Germany, and then attended Harvard Law School where he graduated in 1994 and served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Before entering politics, he co-founded Thayer Aerospace, a Kansas-based defense parts manufacturer, and was elected to represent Kansas's 4th congressional district in 2010.

As Secretary of State, Pompeo oversaw a comprehensive reorientation of American Middle East policy toward Israel's strategic interests. The milestones are enumerable: he presided over the formal recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and the relocation of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv, which was executed in May 2018 during his first months in the role. He recognized U.S. support for Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in 2019 — the first Secretary of State to do so — reversing decades of deliberate American ambiguity. He became the first Secretary of State to visit Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including a visit to a winery in the Psagot settlement, formally breaking with the department's longstanding position that such visits were inappropriate. He was the primary American architect, alongside Jared Kushner, of the Abraham Accords — the normalization agreements between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco announced in 2020 — which represented the most significant shift in Arab-Israeli relations since the Egypt and Jordan peace treaties.

Pompeo also oversaw the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 — a decision that removed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' most consequential operational commander and was broadly welcomed by Israeli officials. His four years in the Trump national security apparatus established a template for what maximum American pro-Israel engagement at the executive branch level looks like when conducted without diplomatic hedging. Author of "Never Give an Inch" (2023), Pompeo remains an active voice in Republican foreign policy circles. At Rank 25, he is the executive-branch architect who translated decades of pro-Israel rhetoric into a record of concrete, irreversible diplomatic and legal facts on the ground.