Chinese Media: Pompeo ‘Tampering with the DNA of Human Diplomacy’

Communist China is evidently delighted by the prospect of dealing with someone other than Mike Pompeo as U.S. Secretary of State.

On Wednesday, the state-run Global Times published a hostile farewell from chief editor Hu Xijin in which he portrayed Pompeo as a mad scientist who has been “tampering with the DNA of human diplomacy.”

Hu was particularly incensed by Pompeo giving a speech at the Ronald Reagan Institute’s Center for Freedom and Democracy in which he referred to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a “Marxist-Leninist monster.” 

Hu denounced Pompeo as a “rare ideologue,” an “extremist,” and “obsessed and narcissistic.” He sneered at Pompeo’s remark that his distrust of Communist China was influenced by his tenure as CIA Director.

The full quote from Pompeo’s speech described the intensifying battle between the free world and authoritarianism. Pompeo saluted President Donald Trump for helping to build a “new and lasting consensus” against tyranny:

The good news is that the free world and sovereign nations are beginning to wake up.  They are now rallying to this cause.  I’ll often hear, we don’t want to pick between the United States and China.  I remind them that that’s not the fight.  The fight is between authoritarianism, barbarism on one side and freedom on the other.

And so we’ve begun to strengthen the institutions that can achieve this objective.  From the Quad, to ASEAN, to NATO, we’ve woken them up to the threat posed by this Marxist-Leninist monster.

The new and lasting consensus on the Chinese Communist Party is an historic result of America’s strength and candor, precisely the traits that President Reagan spoke of.

The fact, the urgency of this matter is now accepted all across the political spectrum, and it shows that the Trump administration has succeeded in making this important shift for American national security and indeed for the freedoms of all humanity.

It’s an accomplishment that will steer a generation of American foreign policymakers.

Pompeo made a point about the globalist foreign policy mindset that emerged after President Ronald Reagan left office – a sort of giddy elite celebration of the “end of history,” as historian Francis Fukuyama famously put it, referring to the alleged universal triumph of classical liberalism after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Pompeo said that globalist consensus was hideously mistaken, and their eagerness to profit financially and politically from the supposedly multilateralist post-Cold War world cost America dearly:

Appeasement and blind engagement makes us weak.  Beijing, Tehran, and other tyrannical regimes take advantage of weakness.

And we cannot ever afford to return to the days when America sacrificed its natural leadership to morally pliant multilateral institutions that, in fact, erode American sovereignty.  These institutions are run by the same kind of “little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital” that Reagan warned us about in his speech that he called “A Time for Choosing.”

We can’t sustain an empty dialogue with regimes that have no intention to forge peace, or to respect the free and open order that we worked so diligently – so diligently to build.

Fielding questions after his speech, Pompeo observed that China has a unique “combination of capacity and intent” that makes them far more dangerous than the squalid little cesspools of communism left behind when the Soviet Union imploded, making the CCP “the central challenge America will face in the years ahead.”

The Global Times editor expected a prospective Biden administration to set aside Pompeo’s crusade against authoritarianism and see things China’s way:

As I said before, Pompeo behaves still like the chief of the CIA. In most countries, intelligence organs converge upon bottom-line thinking. By contrast, diplomatic departments represent more of a country’s openness and inclusiveness. Pompeo has upended that balance by turning the State Department into a more combative and confrontational front foe – even more so than the CIA. He is tampering with the DNA of human diplomacy and has insulted and offended the world’s diplomats by showing a bad example of his own.

As for Pompeo’s stubborn belief that China’s political system is bound to end, I’d like to say that socialist China will live as long as people’s wish for a better life. Today’s US is bound to end its political doctrine with the white supremacy at the center. If Pompeo can live a long life, he will see that the US will not be a white-majority country and the ideology he touts today will crumble. History will not leave space for him.

“Finally, I would like to say to him: Get ready to go,” Hu concluded smugly.

Pompeo actually had similar sentiments about the CCP, whose days he thought were numbered because it would eventually lose its battle to control the very thoughts of its oppressed citizens.

“Yes, the analogy of the Cold War is imperfect and we can talk about the places it’s different, but make no mistake about it:  This innate desire for freedom, for personal autonomy, for human dignity is something that, just as Reagan said, I think, rests in the souls of each of us,” Pompeo said.

He predicted that one day, the free world would help the Chinese people “tear down this firewall that has been built around China,” allowing them to choose a different path than the one “their current leadership is taking them down.”

The famed 1964 Ronald Reagan speech Pompeo referred to, “A Time for Choosing,” can be heard and read in its entirety here.