Johanna Ross, journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland
It was no coincidence that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave his most anti-China speech to date last week in the Richard Nixon library, a place named after a President who turned a new chapter in Sino-US relations in the 1970s. Pompeo had a point to make: that the honeymoon period with China is over, and a new Cold War is emerging between East and West.
The epitaph on Richard Nixon’s gravestone reads: ‘The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker’. It’s a quotation from his first inaugural address, a speech which could not be more contrasting to that of Mike Pompeo’s. In it, Nixon talks about the desire for peace, about ‘moving forward with all mankind’ and trying to make ‘no-one our enemy’. He spoke as someone who saw more similarities between peoples than differences, and of universal values: ‘I also know the people of the world. I have seen the hunger of a homeless child, the pain of a man wounded in battle, the grief of a mother who has lost her son. I know these have no ideology, no race.’ He advocated diplomacy as the only route towards achieving peace: ‘there is no substitute for days and even years of patient and prolonged diplomacy.’
I can’t help but think Richard Nixon, with his Christian values, (he was born and raised as a Quaker), would be turning in his grave if he had heard Mike Pompeo’s latest tirade. Nixon wanted to build bridges with China; Pompeo wants to tear them down. He basically begins by saying that Nixon’s strategy (albeit implemented half a century ago) hasn’t worked. The rhetoric is aggressive. Beijing ‘bites the hand that feeds it’. China has ‘exploited’ the US and bombarded it with propaganda. It has ‘ripped off’ US intellectual property and ‘sucked away’ US supply chains. The Chinese Communist Party ‘subverts the rules-based order’ and ‘erodes freedoms’. Quoting Nixon, Pompeo says that the President had created ‘Frankenstein’s monster.’ The imagery conjured up here by Pompeo is not accidental. For China is the new enemy, and he is out to persuade the American public that it is the archetypal villain, and must be opposed at all costs.
Pompeo plays on the emotions of the public, blaming China in full for the coronavirus pandemic: ‘today we’re all still wearing masks and watching the pandemic’s body count rise because the CCP failed in its promises to the world’. Later on he mentions children, quite deliberately, again to generate sympathy for his argument: ‘If we bend the knee now, our children’s children may be at the mercy of the Chinese Communist Party’. This is a classic technique which we’ve seen leaders, particularly US politicians, use countless times in order to persuade the population of the case to go to war. They appeal to people’s emotions and play up the humanitarian aspects of the case. For the reality is that it’s women you have to win over: after all, they are the ones forced to part with their sons going off to fight. We saw it in recent years with the US intervention in Syria - ‘Assad is gassing his own people’ and again in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003 when Colin Powell made his famous speech to the UN, alleging the country had weapons of mass destruction. In each of these instances, the evidence has been flawed, but it hasn’t stopped the US from ploughing forward on its path of destruction.
The truth, sad though it may seem, is irrelevant to these politicians. If you have control over much of the mainstream media, as western governments do, then you can manipulate your population with ease. Having said that, Pompeo’s speech has had a mixed reaction. Termed ‘surreal’ by a writer for the Brookings Institute, it has already been interpreted as a metaphor for future regime change in China, given the call for the Communist Party to change its ‘behavior’ and the fact that ‘America can no longer ignore the fundamental political and ideological differences between our countries’. Other publications, however, did not pass such negative comment. Worryingly, the UK mainstream press has been largely non-committal, signifying the usual lapdog role Britain plays to US demands, as demonstrated by the recent decision by the Johnson government to withdraw from a deal with Chinese mobile phone provider Huawei.
Pompeo’s speech is a masterpiece in psychological manipulation, hardly surprising given his former CIA role. His hawkish rhetoric is designed to instil fear into ordinary Americans and persuade people that there is no choice but adopt the course of action he suggests. He appeals to the ignorant, giving extraordinary examples of prejudice such as ‘Communists almost always lie’ and inexplicable statements such as ‘People’s Liberation Army is not a normal army’ - as if there is such a thing as a ‘normal army’!
China has, to date, shown remarkable restraint in reaction to such hostility. The rest of the world must take great care before joining Pompeo in his anti-China crusade. The US is rejecting the reality: that a new world order is forming, and America is no longer leading it. A multi-polar world is emerging, and US-led unipolarity is waning. However it won’t go without a fight, as Pompeo demonstrates with his muscle-flexing speech. As Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci aptly put it: ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.’
