According to the U.S. Secretary of State, Washington intends to build relations with Beijing on the principle of “do not trust and check”.
The US should not pursue its previous policy of engagement with China, which has failed. This was stated on Thursday by U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo in his speech on U.S.-Chinese relations “Communist China and the Future of the Free World” at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California.
“The previous system of careless interaction with China has failed”, – he said. – “We can’t continue it, we shouldn’t go back to it.”
According to Pompeo, Americans wonder what the results of the policy of interaction with China have been for almost 50 years. “Have the theories of our leaders, who expected China to evolve towards freedom and democracy, proved their justice? – …he asked himself a question. “Today we must face the harsh truth that must guide us in the years and decades to come if we want freedom in the 21st century, not the Chinese century that [President of China] Xi Jinping dreams of. As [U.S. President Donald] Trump made clear, we need a strategy that protects the American economy and our way of life. The free world must defeat this new tyranny”, – said the U.S. Secretary of State.
When U.S.-Chinese relations were being established under President Richard Nixon’s administration half a century ago, Pompeo continued, “the creators of U.S. policy assumed that as China’s own prosperity grew, there would be more freedom and friendship with other countries. “It seemed inevitable,” he added. – But now, the times when we counted on the inevitability of change are in the past. The engagement we’ve been seeking has not brought the change in China that President Nixon wanted.
As Pompeo said, the U.S. and other Western countries have “opened their arms to the Chinese. “But in response, the Chinese Communist Party began to use the freedoms and openness of our society,” he said. “Maybe we were naive about the dangerous Chinese version of communism or felt victorious after the Cold War, maybe we acted as capitalists or we were deceived by China’s claims of ‘peaceful growth,'” the secretary of state added. – Whatever the reasons, China is now pursuing an increasingly authoritarian domestic policy and increasingly hostile to freedom beyond its borders.
In June, Pompeo announced that the EU and the U.S. have created a new permanent format for political consultations to discuss the threat from China. The purpose of such consultations, he said, is to determine how the U.S. and EU can together “protect freedom and democracy on both sides of the Atlantic from the threat of the Communist Party of China”.