Chinese Communist Party officials are “paranoid” about their nation’s relationship with democratic countries, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned while calling for Europe to “awaken” to the threats from Beijing.

“It might be easy to dismiss the China challenge as just a passing irritant, but I hope you all know it is not so,” he told the Czech Senate on Wednesday. “The regime has a Marxist-Leninist core, no less than the Soviet Union did, and indeed perhaps more so. The party has always put itself first; its actions flow from its ideology. And it’s paranoid about free societies like ours.”