President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the State Department called China’s repression of Uighur Muslims genocide, a rare endorsement of a major eleventh-hour foreign policy decision made by the outgoing Trump administration.
“That would be my judgment as well,” Secretary of State-designate Antony Blinken told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Blinken backed the finding just hours after departing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo unveiled his last-minute assessment. The endorsement also came as the Senate prepares to vote on his nomination to take one of the top posts in Biden’s Cabinet. The hearing featured a conventional chorus of calls for bipartisan cooperation on foreign policy, with the threat posed by China, and particularly the abuse of the Uighurs, featuring prominently in that display of unity.
“On the Uighurs, I think we’re very much in agreement,” Blinken told the panel.
The incoming top diplomat credited the outgoing president with reorienting U.S. policy toward China despite tactical disagreements.
“President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China,” Blinken said. “I disagree very much with the way he went about it in a number of areas, but the basic principle was the right one.”
The remark is a sign the Biden administration intends to keep up the heat on Beijing after seemingly warmer ties under Trump quickly cooled after the COVID-19 pandemic, which the U.S. leader blamed on the Chinese government, and the 45th president growing frustrated with what he called China’s unwillingness to live up to a partial trade deal it struck with his administration.
Pompeo, in one of his final interviews as secretary of state, suggested that public opinion will require Biden to maintain a hard line on Beijing.
“This challenge, the threat from the Chinese Communist Party, is real; it is existential to the United States,” he told Fox News on Tuesday afternoon. “I have great confidence that the American people have come to understand this challenge from the Chinese Communist Party and will expect every leader, whatever political stripe, to continue to protect and secure American freedoms.”
Blinken, who held the No. 2 position at the State Department under then-Secretary of State John Kerry, signaled a willingness to break with the Obama administration in his opening pledge to “engage the world not as it was but as it is.”
