In a tour de force survey of the world stage, the president’s actions, and various challenges facing America around the world, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke to Fox News on Wednesday night and eloquently defended the President Trump and his administration. He first addressed the president’s decision to pull back thousands of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The decisions the president has made about the number of troops we’ll have there reduces American risk for our young men and women, and reduces the cost to American taxpayers. And we’re doing all of this against a backdrop of reduced violence, fewer jihadists, and the capacity to make sure we continue to protect America,” Pompeo told Fox News host Shannon Bream.

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The first in his class at West Point, former congressman, and CIA director had this to say about the overall goals of the Trump administration’s national security policies: “I’ve been in the administration since the very beginning, first as the CIA director and now as the secretary of state. This has always been about delivering counterterrorism, protecting America, and reducing the cost, both in blood and treasure, to the American public.”

Pompeo has also not been silent on China.

Pompeo told Bream he wasn’t surprised President Trump had been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize on Wednesday. “If politics were taken out of it, we can say unequivocally that the reduction in risk that has occurred [was] a result of the work that the president did, whether that was the decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem, to build out a Middle East peace division, and then ultimately to achieve the deal between the United Arab Emirates and Israel.”

Pompeo on North Korea: “The president’s historic visit to Singapore to have his first meeting with Chairman Kim some number of months later has put us in a position where I hope, one day, we can deliver on the fully verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. That’s the mission that the president has given us. We’re continuing to work on it.”

On nuclear proliferation, Pompeo said, “The State Department’s leading a team that’s trying to put together a strategic dialogue to reduce the risk from nuclear weapons, but make no mistake about it, this administration has put real pressure on the Russians. I think we’ve sanctioned 200 or 300 people now. This is an administration that has taken the Russian challenge seriously, trying to put America in the right place to keep Americans safe and secure.”

For the first time since Ronald Reagan, America is respected in the world again and Mike Pompeo has a lot to do with it. As CIA director he did not pull his punches when advising the president on the threats that face this country. As secretary of state he has punctured the Foggy Bottom fallacy that the job of the State Department is to make cozy arrangements with other nations no matter what the cost to American national security. The actual job of the State Department is to advance American interests around the world. Pompeo and the president understand this and America is safer because of it.