Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping will “tyrannize [people] inside and outside” of his country unless democratic nations stop the regime’s rise to global dominance, according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“The old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done,” Pompeo said Thursday while traveling in California. “We need a strategy that protects the American economy and indeed, our way of life. The free world must triumph over this new tyranny.”
Pompeo delivered that exhortation from the Richard Nixon Presidential Library as he proposed to discard “the theories” that impelled the 37th president to make his historic overture to Beijing during the Cold War. Pompeo allowed that Nixon may have had good reasons for adopting his strategy, but he suggested that recent events have demonstrated that the Chinese Communist Party is “a Marxist-Leninist regime” that is hostile to democratic nations.
“This isn’t about containment,” Pompeo said. “It’s about a complex new challenge we’ve never faced before: The USSR was closed off from the free world. Communist China is already here, within our borders. So we can’t face this challenge alone.”
Pompeo suggested that Western powers can go on diplomatic offense, through outreach to Chinese dissidents and policies that put pressure on the unity of the party leadership.
“The CCP fears the Chinese people’s honest opinions more than any foe,” he maintained.
The speech elaborated on Pompeo’s desire to “build out a coalition” of allies to counter Chinese Communist threats, as he put it while traveling in Europe this week. He applauded, during that trip, the United Kingdom’s new ban on Huawei’s involvement in 5G wireless technology infrastructure and condemned China’s move to tighten control over Hong Kong.
“The CCP is repeating some of the same mistakes the Soviet Union made — alienating potential allies, breaking trust at home and abroad, rejecting property rights and a predictable rule of law,” he said during the address.
Pompeo opined that natural tensions between Russia and China might allow Washington to cooperate with Moscow in that effort to blunt Chinese threats, despite the current acrimony between the Kremlin and the United States and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s apparent partnership with Xi.
“I do think there’s that opportunity,” Pompeo said when conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt, during a discussion following his address, asked if U.S. officials might “coax them into the battle” just as Nixon saw Beijing as a thorn in the side of the Soviet Union.
Pompeo added that American and Russian negotiators are in the early stages of arms control negotiations that China has declined to join. “So, I think there is a place for us to work with the Russians to achieve a more likely outcome of peace, not only for the United States but for the world,” he said.
More broadly, Pompeo cast an unchecked Beijing as a fundamental threat to democratic societies.
“If we don’t act now, ultimately, the CCP will erode our freedoms and subvert the rules-based order our societies have worked so hard to build,” he said. “If we bend the knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party.”
