Pompeo’s remarks at the Nixon Library Thursday, titled «Communist China and the Free World’s Future,» cast aspersions on Beijing and its relations with the US, nearly 50 years after President Richard Nixon became the first US president to travel to China.
«We must admit our truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come, that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done,» he said. «We must not continue it and we must not return to it.»
He appeared to cast the US-China competition as a modern day Cold War, saying that «securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time and America is perfectly positioned to lead it.»
Pompeo delivered the speech on the heels of a
US order to close the Chinese consulate in Houston — «because it was a hub of spying and intellectual property theft,» in his words. The order — the latest in a series of escalations between Washington and Beijing — demands that the Chinese shutter the property by Friday.
The Washington Post
July 24, 2020 at 11:05 p.m. GMT+2
This is the startling line from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Thursday that will long resonate within national security circles of administrations of both parties.
“President [Ronald] Reagan said that he dealt with the Soviet Union on the basis of ‘trust but verify.’ When it comes to CCP, I say we must distrust and verify.”
Pompeo had just laid a wreath at the gravesite of Richard M. Nixon after touring the museum and library that honors the former president. Then, speaking to a few hundred socially distanced guests near Nixon’s boyhood home, Pompeo announced a bold new chapter in the United States’ relationship with the People’s Republic of China.
Almost 50 years after Nixon dispatched his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, on a secret mission to Beijing, Pompeo brought down the curtain on the blind hope that China would simply evolve into a western-style democracy.
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