In a broad-ranging press briefing this morning, the pompous pseudo-Christian Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the U.S. will impose visa restrictions on “certain employees” of Chinese technology firms, “like Huawei, that provide material support to regimes engaging in human rights violations and abuses globally.” Huawei (a private company), he charged, is “an arm of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance state that censors political dissidents and enables mass internment camps in Xinjiang and the indentured servitude of its population shipped all over China.” He then threatened, “telecommunications companies around the world should consider themselves on notice: If they are doing business with Huawei, they are doing business with human rights abusers.”
Not limiting himself to Huawei, Pompeo then threatened European companies involved in Russia’s Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream pipeline projects, warning that, should they continue to collaborate in these “malign projects,” their “investments and other activities” will be subject to sanctions under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. “Get out now or suffer the consequences,” he warned. Don’t think that these energy projects are commercial ones, he pontificated. They are really the Kremlin’s “key tools” to ensure Europe’s dependence on Russian energy sources, and undermine European — and especially Ukrainian — democracy.
It is instructive that in the Q&A session, Pompeo asserted that over the past two and a half years — precisely the time frame in which British doctrine of geopolitical confrontation has been foisted on Trump, despite his more positive inclinations — the “Chinese Communist Party’s behavior” has changed. They’re expansionist, he said, and because of that the relationship has changed. When it stops, the relationship will change, but in the meantime, China must be “held accountable” for the spread of the coronavirus. He charged that the World Health Organization’s investigative visit to China will be a whitewash. Besides, Xi Jinping’s talk of “win-win” and nice summits is just that — talk. While he said that there are still bilateral meetings occurring at every level of government, the bottom line is that China’s “conduct” has changed. It is different, and therefore U.S. policy is different, compared to what it once was.
