During the Republican National Convention last week, the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo got a lot of attention for using public resources to travel to Israel to give a convention speech he could have delivered from his living room. The abuse of his position for party politics was an untoward, unprofessional, and unethical contravention of longstanding norms, if not the law. Yet in the long run, less important than what Pompeo did last week is what he didn’t do: stand with the courageous people of Belarus.
The last month has been a seismic political moment in Belarus, replete with dramatic scenes recalling other historic European flashpoints—Prague in 1968, Gdansk in 1980. Stunning mass protests erupted in the wake of the flagrantly rigged Aug. 9 elections in which incumbent Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko—in power for a quarter century and known as “Europe’s last dictator”—claimed victory despite widespread fraud and a likely loss to opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. Having stepped up in July after her husband was denied registration as a candidate and arrested by the regime, she proved a capable if unlikely politician, and she managed to consolidate the opposition and draw huge crowds at rallies in the weeks before the election. After Lukashenko declared himself the winner, Tsikhanouskaya fled to Lithuania, fearing for her safety.
