Mr. Pompeo, analysts said, would bring other qualities to the State Department that could make him more effective than Mr. Tillerson, not least his healthy relationship with the president. Mr. Pompeo has won credit at the C.I.A. for consulting the agency’s professional staff, something that Mr. Tillerson has conspicuously chosen not to do.
But based on his record and recent statements, experts said, Mr. Pompeo will line up squarely with the hawks in an administration that is already hard-line on issues including Iran and North Korea.
“Pompeo has done nothing but talk about how we need to take the gloves off,” said Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “There’s no reason to believe he would change his views if you put him in charge of the State Department.”
Mr. Pompeo’s hard-edge views, as the nation’s chief diplomat, might reinforce, rather than restrain, Mr. Trump’s instincts. That could further stiffen American policy toward Iran, where Mr. Tillerson, along with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, urged Mr. Trump not to scrap the nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama.
As a Republican representative from Kansas elected in the Tea Party wave in 2011, Mr. Pompeo, 53, was among the most vocal opponents of Mr. Obama’s diplomacy with Tehran. Days after Mr. Trump was elected, he wrote on Twitter, “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.”
Later, at the C.I.A., Mr. Pompeo pushed for the release of classified documents from the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, which included evidence of links between Al Qaeda and Iran. Mr. Pompeo has said the move was in the interest of greater transparency. Critics say it was calculated to undermine support for the nuclear deal.
On North Korea, Mr. Pompeo has come as close as any Trump administration official to calling for the removal of that country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. Speaking in July at the Aspen Security Forum, he said that “the thing that is most dangerous about it is the character who holds the control over” North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.
“From the administration’s perspective, the most important thing we can do is separate those two. Right?” Mr. Pompeo said. “Separate capacity and someone who might well have intent and break those two apart.”
Mr. Tillerson has explicitly ruled out regime change as the administration’s policy. In White House debates, he has argued for keeping the door open to diplomacy, despite Mr. Kim’s repeated missile launches and Mr. Trump’s threats to use military force against the North.
The secretary of state’s public statements have been more measured than those of the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who has spoken of the possibility of waging a “preventive war” against North Korea — let alone the president, who on Wednesday labeled Mr. Kim “Little Rocket Man” and a “sick puppy.”
Mr. Pompeo, by contrast, has been uncommonly vocal for a C.I.A. director, whose job traditionally is to present the president with unvarnished intelligence rather than to influence policy debates. In Aspen, he likened Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal to a bad tenant paying rent.
“They don’t pay the rent, you call them, and then they send a check and it doesn’t clear,” Mr. Pompeo said. “And then the next day, there’s this tired old sofa in the front yard.”
When pressed on Russia’s meddling in the election, which the C.I.A. has confirmed, he expressed an impatience that sounded a lot like Mr. Trump’s.
“It’s true, yeah, of course,” Mr. Pompeo said. He added it was true of the election “before that, and the one before that. They’ve been at this a hell of a long time. And I don’t think they have any intention of backing off.”
Mr. Tillerson has been less blithe in his handling of the issue. When he met the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, in the Philippines in August, he said he told him “just how serious this incident had been and how seriously it had damaged the relationship between the U.S. and the American people and the Russian people.”
Mr. Tillerson weighed in with Mr. Trump after the president openly backed Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in a bitter dispute with neighboring Qatar. Pointing out that Qatar played host to a major American air base, Mr. Tillerson helped persuade Mr. Trump to shift to a more neutral role, urging both sides to settle their differences.
To some in Washington, Mr. Tillerson has served as a type of adult supervision for Mr. Trump. He, along with Mr. Mattis and the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, “are those people that help separate our country from chaos,” said Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Critics, though, point out that Mr. Tillerson’s involvement did not lead to a resolution of the Saudi-Qatar dispute. Nor have his diplomatic labors eased tensions with North Korea. Mr. Tillerson’s isolated management style and antagonistic relations with his own agency more than outweighed any beneficial effects from his moderate inclinations.
“The damage that has been done to the United States, and to the State Department, under Tillerson has really been profound,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a fierce critic of Mr. Trump who served as a top official in the department under President George W. Bush. “He is the worst secretary of state in our history.”
Mr. Cohen said that if Mr. Pompeo were named, he could use his politician’s skills to campaign more effectively for the State Department on budget issues. He should also have more success in filling the department’s depleted ranks. And his closeness to Mr. Trump would give him credibility with foreign ministers that Mr. Tillerson seems to lack.
And yet it is precisely those qualities that could also enable Mr. Pompeo to tip the balance on fraught foreign policy issues.
“There will be many issues of foreign policy in which the balance between a hard line and a more moderate view are finely balanced,” said Paul R. Pillar, a longtime former C.I.A. official now at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. “The voice of the secretary of state, leaning in one direction or another, will make a difference.”
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