The West’s slow response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has the Chinese Communist Party eager to get its own “free bite at the apple” by taking Taiwan, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday during a speech at The Heritage Foundation.
Pompeo noted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s remote address earlier in the day to a joint session of Congress, soon followed by remarks from President Joe Biden on committing $800 million in new U.S. military assistance to besieged Ukraine.
“We need to continue to make sure we focus on things that present the next risk, the next great war, and the next challenge to human dignity, to Western civilization, and to our way of life here at home,” Pompeo told his Heritage Foundation audience.
“We see in Ukraine what happens when you are in the muddy middle, when there is ambiguity, when bad guys in the world don’t exactly know how the West will respond.”
Pompeo’s address at Heritage, the parent organization of The Daily Signal, came a week after he visited Taiwan, the island nation off China’s coast.
Former President Donald Trump’s second secretary of state drew parallels between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s push into Ukraine and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s aggressive gestures toward Taiwan.
“It became very clear to me that one of the central features [of] making sure Taiwan has the capacity to defend itself is the world recognizing what we all know to be true,” Pompeo said.
“It is not part of China,” he said of Taiwan. “If it became part of China, this wouldn’t be reunification. This would be an aggressive action to destroy the sovereignty of an independent country.”
Xi is observing American leadership and likely is encouraged, Pompeo said, first by the Biden administration’s botched exit from Afghanistan and then by its response to Russia’s buildup of troops on the Ukraine border:
Xi watched what happened in Afghanistan. He saw the United States not taking the simple task of making sure to protect what it had fought for, for 20 years, then watched us applaud as we and the West united only after the enormous suffering and devastation inside of Ukraine. As Xi thinks about what the world will look like when this particular confrontation comes to its conclusion, he must surely wonder if he won’t get one free pass, one free bite at the apple, before the West begins to protect sovereign nations in the region. We cannot let that be the case.
Pompeo observed that Xi also might face concerns as he sees the difficulty Putin has had with his invasion of Ukraine.
“[Taiwan is] fully capable of securing and defending their own nation, making the cost calculous for Xi really, really challenging,” Pompeo said. “Xi too must be wondering if his generals are lying to him as well. … We need to make sure that the Taiwanese people who will be prepared to fight and defend their own nation have the tools and resources they need.”
The world’s current threats demonstrate why the Trump administration was correct in trying to make post-World War II international institutions effective, Pompeo said, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization.
He rejected critics’ characterization that the Trump administration abandoned the global playing field.
“What I saw instead was an effort to make these institutions functional, to make them work, to make them effective,” Pompeo said, adding:
It is not of much value to have a NATO that refuses to spend money inside of their own countries to protect themselves. It is not of much value to have a United Nations that is incapable of actually delivering on its commitments to the world.
It is not of much value to have a World Health Organization that when the moment it is called upon, the single thing, you know the old joke—you had one job, which was to prevent a global pandemic. In that moment, you allowed Xi Jinping to drive your organization’s behavior. What we were aiming for was not to destroy these institutions but to take these institutions—most of which were created in the aftermath of World War II—and to make sure they were fit for purposes in today’s world.
To confront the Chinese Communist Party, these organizations and institutions all will have to meet the challenge of our times.
Pompeo recalled that when he talked to NATO allies about spending 2% of their gross domestic product on defense, his counterparts often balked about the difficult political sell to their constituents.
Leaders in Europe and the United States must make the case to the public for why a strong defense is important, he said.
“Xi Jinping firmly believes that America is in decline. I think Putin believes that elements of America are in decline as well,” Pompeo said, adding:
We are going to pull through these things, but only when leaders are prepared to explain why these things matter, why someone sitting in New Mexico or New Hampshire should give a darn about what is going on in Ukraine. I think they can see it more clearly today than they could even six or eight weeks ago.
Pompeo appeared at Heritage to deliver the think tank’s annual B.C. Lee Lecture on international affairs, endowed by Samsung Group in honor of its late founder, B.C. Lee, to focus on the U.S. relationship with the Indo-Pacific.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email [email protected] and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
