Mike Pompeo and the threat of Xi Jinping's dream
Addressing an audience at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library on Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo explained the world's greatest and most dangerous lie.
Namely, that Xi Jinping's "dream" of Chinese Communist Party global leadership is compatible with humanity's interests.
On the contrary, Pompeo argued, "We must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come, if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century Xi Jinping dreams of: The old paradigm of blind engagement with China has failed. We must not continue it. And we must not return to it."
This reference to Xi's dream is not a coincidental choice of words. China's leader, the most powerful since Mao Zedong, frames his ambition for Chinese global supremacy around the idea of a "Chinese dream" in which Beijing leads Earth into a future of mutual peace and prosperity. Xi insists that this dream welcomes all nations and peoples, offering trade and peace alongside mutual respect. But we now have abundant proof that the dream is a lie. It is a lie proven by China's annual theft of hundreds of billions of dollars in intellectual property secrets, its imperialism in the South China Sea, its breach of international treaty commitments, and the Communist Party's use of people (those it is sworn to serve) as slave labor.
This should not surprise us.
After all, communist China, Pompeo noted, is a "Marxist-Leninist regime. General Secretary Xi Jinping is a true believer in a bankrupt totalitarian ideology. His ideology informs his decadeslong desire for global hegemony built on Chinese communism. We can no longer ignore the fundamental political and ideological differences between our countries, just as the CCP has never ignored them."
This stark contrast between America and communist China cannot simply be observed. Countering Xi's effort to displace the post-war U.S.-led liberal international order, Pompeo said, "is the mission of our time."
He is correct.
Still, Pompeo wasn't calling for relentless confrontation here. Rather, he was articulating the need for hard-headed realism. Just as Nixon used a position of strength to travel to China and seek a better way forward with Mao, the U.S. should seek a better way forward with Xi. Pompeo's point is that this way forward will be impossible unless we recognize what Xi is (a dictator) and what he wants — a global order planted firmly under the Chinese communist flag.
Whoever wins the November election will have to grapple with this truth. Facing no elections of his own, Xi isn't going anywhere. The stakes are high. Just as President Trump continues to delude himself that Xi is his friend, too many Democrats believe that China and the U.S. share certain interests. Such on shared action to address climate change, for example (wrong). This reaches to the top of the Democratic Party foreign policy establishment. President Barack Obama's former national security adviser, Susan Rice, thinks she is a China hawk but is actually an apologist for the regime.
We need to look at China today as George Kennan called on us to recognize the Soviet Union in 1946 — as an intentionally existential foe both to the American way of life and to a global politics centered on human freedom. Once we admit that truth and hold to it, we'll be able to engage with China in a more productive fashion.
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