Pompeo threatens China with a new Cold War.

If you have any doubts that the Trump administration has embarked on a Cold War policy against China as hostile as the United States’ stance toward the Soviet Union at the height of that confrontation, check out the Secretary of State’s Thursday speech Mike Pompeo at the Richard Nixon Library.

Regarding the type of speeches that Nixon himself delivered in the 1950s (during his days of red hunting, before opening to Beijing), he asks to end the commitment to China, to push back its fledgling empire and to reunite the Chinese people to overthrow his people. regime.

Combined with other recent speeches by Trump officials and a series of actions by Trump himself, it amounts to a rallying cry. But it is a meaningless cry: implausible, unfeasible, and inattentive to the damage that further escalation will inflict on our own country and its allies.

Portions of Pompeo’s speech, detailing the growing dangers posed by the Chinese Communist Party, are accurate. Under the Xi Jinping government, the CCP has taken control of all national institutions, suppressed dissent, imprisoned one million Uighur Muslims, militarized the South China Sea beyond its internationally recognized borders, exploited trade agreements , stole intellectual property and infiltrated the West with industry. spies

But what should we do about it? Pompeo says there is nothing to do except cut to China. The engagement with China, sought by all presidents beginning with Nixon, has been a “failure,” he says. The CCP has not changed its trends since the days of Mao Zedong. The clash is not only between the United States and China, but also freedom against totalitarianism. The solution is to attack the forces of freedom – the oppressed peoples – within China, and ask other nations to do the same.

This is fantasy, and dangerous, on several levels.

First, neither Trump nor Pompeo is in a strong position to take a high moral position. Nothing Trump has done to American citizens comes close to the oppression Xi has inflicted on the Uighurs or in Hong Kong, but Trump has not said much about Hong Kong, and, according to what John Bolton said, gave Xi a thumb: to hit the Uighurs in concentration camps. In any case, the world shows no interest in following the moral dictates of an administration that puts migrant children in cages or shoots tear gas at the mothers of peaceful protesters. Legendary diplomat George Kennan, architect of the United States Cold War containment policy, once said: “It is primarily for example, never by precept, that a country like ours exercises its most useful influence beyond its borders ” Under that standard, Trump fails the test; No one, in China or anywhere else, will take their movements seriously with Pompeo’s fingers.

Second, Trump and Pompeo are not holding high strategic land either. It is not a good idea for the top diplomat in the United States to make existential threats against a nation that owns $ 1 trillion of our debt and serves as the primary, in some cases, the sole source of so many consumer goods, including medical products. The latter could be particularly useful during a pandemic, which will likely be defeated, if at all, through a global effort. Certainly, over the years, US politicians and companies jumped too anxiously into the Chinese market to take advantage of its cheap labor (for imports) and massive growth (for exports), and as a result we have become too dependent. COVID-19 blockages raised awareness of this problem, and in response, many manufacturers are diversifying their supply chains as much as possible. This is good, both to reduce our vulnerability to trade wars and to rebalance geopolitical scales. But there is no way to separate China from our economy entirely.

Third, Pompeo’s comments will not help advance Chinese democracy. Rather, Xi will likely invoke the speech to further criticize and persecute democratic dissidents and activists in mainland China and Hong Kong as US-backed saboteurs.

Most Chinese might even believe the charge, as Trump’s harsh rhetoric and trade war have already inflamed anti-American sentiment.

Fourth, Pompeo does not show a real understanding of what has been happening in China for the past 50 years. He claims that the commitment has failed and that the CCP has not changed since Mao’s time. This is simply absurd. Yes, China has stretched or broken some of the rules it agreed to follow when the West let it through to the World Trade Organization and other institutions. But he has also adopted many of those rules. It disrupted hundreds of practices to join the WTO. Its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which it established as an alternative to the World Bank, follows global financial standards. The CCP itself is no longer a party of purely communist ideology, as it was under Mao, but rather a nation-building tool. It is true that Xi has used the party to enhance his own power, but Pompeo is wrong in saying that he propagates “a bankrupt totalitarian ideology.” Millions of Chinese citizens who came out of extreme poverty, as well as the leaders of many developing countries, who are looking for a model to emulate, see today’s China as a success story.

Which leads to the final problem with Pompeo’s speech: he offers no ideas on how to avoid China’s challenge to the West, and it is a challenge. Possibly he mentions bringing NATO allies together for the cause, but offers no reasons why they should join. (Several allies followed Trump’s lead by banning Huawei software from his 5G systems, but that was because the US and Western European intelligence agencies, which still have strong ties: agreed that the Huawei team posed threats to national security.) After his speech, during a question-and-answer period moderated by conservative columnist Hugh Hewitt, Pompeo hailed Russia as a great potential ally against China, saying nothing about Vladimir Putin’s indulgence in the same sins. . – Violating human rights and threatening American democracy – for which he condemns the CCP. Again, no one will take this talk seriously; the next time Putin and Xi talk, they might laugh about it.

China is advancing in the world, in large part because the United States does not offer an attractive alternative. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, which President Barack Obama signed with 11 other heads of state, could have presented a powerful bulwark against China’s expansive trade policies, but Trump withdrew from the deal. (The other countries created their own trade agreement, minus the US; it has had some effect, but not as much as the larger version.) Trump has sent aircraft carriers to the South China Sea to challenge Xi’s territorial claims, but what will he do if Xi pushes? What will he do if Xi it doesn’t push back? Our Asian allies want American leadership. Many heads of state who have joined the China Belt and Highway Initiative bother in its harsh conditions; They would rather sign something with us, but Trump has nothing to give them.

Trump appears to have given up any commitment to China, despite the two countries sharing a number of common interests. He hasn’t talked for a long time about going beyond Phase 1 of the trade deal that was once a big topic of conversation in his reelection campaign, until he turned to blaming China for all of his ailments. Last month, before Pompeo’s conversation, three other administration officials – national security adviser Robert O’Brien, Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray – have delivered speeches on the threat from China, each one surpassing the others in his harsh rhetoric. This week, Trump closed the Chinese consulate in Houston, calling it a spy nest (which may be, as are many consulates in many countries), prompting China to shut down the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu, which that he had allowed some American diplomats in the Sichuah, Yunan and Guizhou provinces, as well as in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Net profit for American interests? Zero, possibly negative.

“I don’t see any strategy,” said Elizabeth Economy, director of Asian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, when asked about Pompeo’s speech and Trump’s policy towards China in general. “It is slash and burn at this point … only punishment for punishment.”

China is not going to disappear, nor is the CCP about to dissolve, and nothing Trump or any other Western leader does is going to change that. As other presidents have recognized, America’s policy toward China today must contain a mix of compromise and containment. The trick is to find the correct combination. Trump has given up on the game, and growling conferences like Pompeo’s won’t work with magic.

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