Secretary Pompeo at a State Department news conference (AP, Oct. 21, 2020)
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Trump administration’s chief diplomat, said he regrets that the United States has not made more progress on the “tough issues” of China and North Korea, which he described as the “unfinished business” of the current administration. But Pompeo argued that the Trump administration’s foreign policy has made the world safer than it was four years ago.
According to an interview with Pompeo on Bloomberg Television on Monday (Jan. 4), Pompeo said that despite the Trump administration’s tough policy toward China, unfair trade relations will continue between the U.S. and China, and that the theft of U.S. intellectual property by the Chinese Communist Party remains a problem. On the North Korean side, he said Kim Jong Un has not made a decision on his readiness to implement his pledge to Trump to give up nuclear weapons.
Nonetheless, Pompeo said the U.S. has achieved a number of key goals under Trump, including a more realistic policy toward Israel and Iran, a reorientation of NATO to confront the Chinese Communist Party and the creation of a coalition against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
America First to Stand Firm
Biden has repeatedly said that his China policy will focus on uniting U.S. allies in dealing with Beijing’s aggressive trade policies. The fundamental flaw in the Trump administration’s trade strategy is that it is a one-man strategy,” his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told CNN on Sunday. …… Frankly, it’s worse than a one-man war, it’s opening up two or three trade wars against our true allies and partners who are supposed to be standing with us.”
But a senior U.S. State Department official, who asked not to be named, countered, “To say that we are like the western cowboy bent on going it alone, going it alone, that’s all a lack of reality, and he (referring to the Biden team) immediately senses that the so-called allies are not what he thinks they are, and that everyone has their own agenda based on their own national interests. So, it must be the U.S. interests first to put his feet firmly on the ground.”
The EU recently signed the Sino-European Investment Agreement (CEIA) with China, which had been under negotiation for eight years, despite U.S. opposition. The New York Times commented that this was a diplomatic move by Xi Jinping to “put China in the position of an indispensable global leader.”
But the State Department official interpreted it differently: “The EU’s investment agreement with China shows the EU’s opportunism.”
Pompeo’s Intensive Tweets Slamming Chinese Communist Abuses for Evil
In an unprecedented foreign policy move, the current U.S. administration has cut the Chinese Communist Party from the Chinese people, pointing the finger at the Chinese Communist Party, which claims to represent 1.4 billion Chinese people at every turn. Secretary Pompeo himself has issued statements on nearly every incident related to the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown on human rights.
The State Department official said, “Beginning two weeks ago at least until January 20, Secretary Pompeo tweeted intensively. We’ve prepared hundreds of them, summarizing four years of symbolic successes driven by the new foreign policy.”
Among the China-related tweets were.
On December 31, “12 Hong Kong people have no bail, no choice of lawyers, and no chance of reuniting with their families. This is a stark preview of the future of Hong Kong, deprived of judicial protection by the authoritarian ‘one country, one system’ framework.”
On December 29, “In the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s lies, Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhan’s uncensored report published in Wuhan provided the world with a much-needed window into the new coronavirus outbreak. She should be commended for her courage – not imprisoned for it.”
On December 23, “We’ve turned the tide on the Communist Party of China’s 5G master plan. The United States proudly unites our partners and allies in the European Union, the Three Seas nations, NATO and the OECD in a clean network to counter the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party. An alliance built on trust will surely prevail over the surveillance state.”
December 21, “Today, I announced measures to impose additional restrictions on visas for officials of the Communist Party of China and the People’s Republic of China who are believed to be responsible for or involved in the repression of members of ethnic minorities, religious practitioners, and human rights defenders.”
On December 18, “As General Secretary Xi Jinping continues to engage in civil-military integration, human rights abuses and bullying in the South China Sea, we are taking action to defend U.S. national security and foreign policy interests by adding new entities to the list.”
On the same day, Pompeo also issued this tweet, “The 12 Hong Kong nationals should be released immediately. Their so-called ‘crime’ was escaping tyranny. Today’s Chinese Communist Party is turning Hong Kong into the East Berlin of yesteryear, doing its best to prevent its own people from seeking freedom.”
On Dec. 17, “Chinese Communist scientists are not pioneers in cancer treatment, and we are. North Korean biochemists did not produce a safe COVID vaccine, while we do. The Iranians are not ahead in supercomputing, while we are. The free world and free people produce excellent results. We should be proud of that.”
U.S. foreign policy should be on the side of the Chinese people
Traditionally, U.S. diplomats have been much critical of Pompeo’s diplomatic style. Ambassador Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has criticized Secretary Pompeo for “talking about the Chinese Communist Party without talking about China, as if there is a China separate from the Chinese Communist Party. This implies confrontation and makes diplomacy impossible, and unless his goal is to ensure that diplomacy fails, this should not be a position taken by the chief diplomat of the United States.”
In response, Pompeo said such statements show a condescending arrogance toward the Chinese people, “The Chinese people are equally created in the image of God, they have all the power that anyone in the world has, and to think that we should ignore the voice of the Chinese people is, to me, the wrong approach,” Pompeo said. “I believe that the Chinese Communist Party is a one-party dictatorship. We see the Chinese Communist Party as the head of China. We need to have a dialogue, but to me, if we ignore the Chinese people, we are humiliating ourselves and the Chinese people.”
The senior State Department official, who asked not to be named, explained that Secretary Pompeo’s point was that “the Chinese Communist Party represents the interests of one party of the Communist Party and does not represent the interests of the Chinese people,” and that “it’s not that we don’t deal with the Chinese Communist Party, but when we do deal with them we need to make them understand that we don’t just sign the agreement and be done with it, we demand freedom of speech, freedom of Freedom of information, we will emphasize the need to make Facebook, Twitter and the Voice of America available to the Chinese people to see and hear. It’s important to have a clearer head in this regard, that is, of course there has to be diplomacy with the Chinese government that controls China, but we will never equate the interests of the Chinese common Chinese people.”
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