The confrontation between the United States and China is accelerating with each passing week. In recent days, the Chinese consulate in Houston has been closed amid accusations that it was a spy center, and the US mission in the southwestern city of Chengdu was closed in retaliation, for similar reasons.
The FBI began arresting Chinese investigators at American universities with suspected links to the People’s Liberation Army (EPL), one of whom temporarily fled to the consulate in San Francisco, before surrendering.
American academics and businessmen are coming under increased scrutiny over ties to Beijing and have been warned to clarify about them under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The toughest legal measures have been accompanied by a set of concerted speeches attacking China by top Trump administration national security and foreign policy officials, culminating in a speech Thursday by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stating: “The free world must triumph over this new tyranny.”
Pompeo traveled to Yorba Linda, California, home of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, to declare that the historic opening of the Republican President to China in 1972 had begun an exercise in failure in the east-west détente.
“The kind of compromise we have been looking for has not brought the exchange rate in China that President Nixon hoped to induce,” Pompeo said. “The truth is that our policies, and those of other free nations, resurrected China’s bankrupt economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that fed it.”
Part of the great geopolitical language can be attributed to the importance of anti-China sentiment in Donald Trump’s attempt to save his presidency in the November elections. And part of this is inspired by Pompeo’s own efforts, increasingly at the expense of his daily work, to position himself for a presidential race in 2024.
But much of what Pompeo said will have global resonance thanks to Beijing’s mounting aggression on multiple fronts around the world. At the same time that it brought together more than a million Muslim Uighurs in internment camps, the regime nullified the freedoms that Hong Kong enjoys, seized the disputed atolls, reefs and schools in the South China Sea and the he turned into concrete strongholds, and led a dangerous land grab on his border with India.
Pompeo argued that fighting control of the Chinese Communist Party “is the mission of our time,” a statement that will likely make heads nod over at least much of Asia and the Pacific. But his claim, in his next breath, that “the United States is perfectly positioned to lead it” will sound empty among many of Washington’s bewildered allies.
In his eyes, China has expanded into a vacuum left by the withdrawal of the United States under the Trump administration towards jingoism and “America First” unilateralism.
One of Trump’s first foreign policy measures was to pull the United States out of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was designed as an economic coalition to prevent China from dictating the terms of trade in the 21st century. United States allies in the region continued anyway, but was severely weakened by the absence of the United States administration, which instead sought to wipe out existing trade agreements with its partners.
Similarly, the United States’ effort to convince China to join the arms control negotiations would have more weight on the world stage if the Trump administration had not abandoned three arms control agreements to date and is apparently in the process of getting rid of a fourth, the New Beginning deal that limits American and Russian strategic nuclear weapons.
The abrupt departure of the United States from the World Health Organization amid a pandemic, accompanied by a campaign of unsubstantiated allegations against its Pompeo-led officials, is also often cited by diplomats published in Washington as an example of the United States abdicating its role of global leadership. .
The failure of governance evident in the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has left the United States as the largest and longest-running hotspot, and Americans who have been banned from large-scale travel Part of the world, it has also made it difficult for US diplomats to cajole foreign governments in a common cause against China, without drawing aching smiles.
The same could be said of the spectacle of unidentified and apparently not responsible paramilitary units making arrests in Portland. In terms of scale, it could not be more different from the mass incarceration of the Uighurs, but it is not a good aspect for a nation that seeks to recover the mantle of leadership of the free world.
It is a stroke of luck for American diplomacy that, at a time when it is weakest when it comes to recruiting allies, China is doing much of the work on its behalf.
