Distrust and verify: US ups ante against China

CRITICAL SHIFT Pompeo calls for international coalition of democracies to rein in Xi regime

WASHINGTON::THE US government launched one of its most strident attacks on China yet with secretary of state Michael Pompeo on Thursday repudiating decadesold American policy of engaging with communist China as a strategy that “failed”, and asking allies and world powers to use “more creative and assertive ways” to press Beijing to change its ways.

Pompeo drew on a significant cold war terminology and said China’s military had became “stronger and more menacing” and the approach to Beijing should be “distrust and verify”, adapting President Ronald Reagan’s “trust but verify” mantra about the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

The comments come at a time when Beijing’s ties with Washington, as well as New Delhi, are at their worst in decades, and other countries – such as the UK and Australia – have expressed new concerns over threats emanating from China, particularly those relating to how Chinese companies may be helping the government spy on people around the world and the way Beijing may be flexing its muscles in territorial disputes.

“The old paradigm of blind engagement with China has failed,” Pompeo said in a widely anticipated policy speech at a legacy California library run by the foundation of late President Richard Nixon, who re-established diplomatic ties with China and paved the way for its opening up to the world with a historic visit in 1972. “If the free world doesn’t change Communist China — [it] will surely change us,” Pompeo added, attacking what is one of the most significant Republican foreign policy achievements in the last five decades. “The free world must triumph over this new tyranny,” he said.

It was Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, the first by an American president since the Communists took power in 1949, that upended a Cold War paradigm and paved the way for the normalisation of relations in 1979. The thaw was precipitated by a deterioration in China’s ties with the Soviet Union. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping visited the US in 1979 after the establishment of diplomatic ties, smiling in photos as he tried on a cowboy hat in Texas. The Houston consulate that is being shut this week opened later the same year -- it was China’s first in the United States.

Thursday’s speech was the fourth in a formatted series by senior members of the Trump administration framing the deteriorating relations with China, which has also been marked by a slew of punitive measures.