British and American officials need to help establish an international “coalition” to counter threats from the Chinese Communist Party, according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“We want every nation to work together to push back against the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts,” Pompeo said Tuesday in London. “We hope we can build out a coalition that understands this threat, will work collectively to convince the Chinese Communist Party it’s not in their best interest to engage in this kind of behavior.”
Pompeo traveled to the United Kingdom on the heels of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to bar Huawei from participating in the development of the U.K.’s fifth-generation wireless technology infrastructure. Johnson hardened his position on Huawei just months after rebuffing Pompeo’s denunciations of the company, a reversal brought about in part by anger over China’s apparent dishonesty about the coronavirus pandemic — a failure that Pompeo underscored during his visit.
“On behalf of the American people, I want to extend my condolences to the British people from your losses from this preventable pandemic,” he said after a meeting with British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab. “The CCP’s exploitation of this disaster to further its own interests has been disgraceful.”
“The U.K. is really clear that we need to work with our American friends and also with other partners together in the international system to protect our freedoms and interests and stand up — as we’ve shown, I think, on Hong Kong — stand up for our values,” Raab said.
Western coordination regarding China has been slow in the making, however, due to China’s economic clout. Johnson has praised China’s Belt and Road Initiative, an overseas economic investment program that Pompeo has denounced as a communist plot to buy an empire, and some European allies are expected to seek Chinese investment to repair the economic damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Despite seeking a coalition to counter Chinese threats, Pompeo rejected the idea that he wants allies to help “confront China,” not making clear what the distinction was. And he huddled with China hawks at a London think tank, the Henry Jackson Society, before his meetings with Johnson and Raab. “I think Pompeo wants to hear what the mood in Parliament is and scope out the full extent of the U.K.’s China debate at the moment,” a spokesman for the Henry Jackson Society said.
In public, he distinguished between an endemic hostility to China and the need to counter particular hostile actions taken by the party.
“The entire world needs to work together to ensure that every country, including China, behaves in the international system in ways that are appropriate and consistent with the international order,” Pompeo said. “We want to see every nation who understands freedom and democracy and values that and knows that it’s important to their own people, their own sovereign country to be successful, to understand this threat that the Chinese Communist Party is posing to them and to work both themselves and collectively to restore what is rightfully ours.”
