U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday (September 2, 2020) addressed the Trump administration’s China policy on several occasions and again confronted the question of whether the U.S. economy should be fully decoupled from China.
Pompeo spent much of his State Department press conference describing the unequal nature of U.S.-China relations and the actions the Trump administration is taking in response, including imposing new restrictions on the activities of Chinese diplomats in the U.S. in response to long-standing restrictions on the movement of U.S. diplomats in China.
On the same day, Pompeo was asked on a program hosted by former White House aide Sebastian Gorka, must the United States do business with China, the world’s largest communist country?
Pompeo replied that the data show that China has been exploiting the United States for decades, at least the last 15 to 20 years, and that President Trump is the first president to point out the problem and acknowledge that the United States must respond. He said that the situation is changing as a result of actions taken by the Trump administration, but that more needs to be done. Pompeo said, “I don’t know what the end game will be, but the United States will demand that China’s actions be transparent, fair, reciprocal and respectful of the most important human rights values that the United States has long cherished.”
Later that evening, Pompeo was a guest on “The Sean Hannity Show. When asked whether the biggest security threat to the United States was China or Russia, he said, “The biggest single foreign power threat to the United States is the Communist Party of China.
Last month, President Trump said in a Fox News interview that “we don’t have to” do business with China, and later said of decoupling, “If they treat us the wrong way, then I’m going to do that.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin also said in June that the U.S. and Chinese economies would be “decoupled” if U.S. companies could not compete fairly in China.
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