Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joined Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Friday morning to discuss the People’s Republic of China, the Communist Party of China and the COVID-19 virus.
HUGH HEWITT, HOST: Now Mr. Secretary, I don’t know what they teach at Harvard Law, but at Michigan Law, they taught me that if a witness or a party lies about big things, you don’t believe them on anything. And on that theory, they’ve lied about some big things. I don’t know that I would trust them to put on the Olympic games if they told us it was safe to do it. Do you think the Olympic games scheduled for Beijing in 2022 ought to be moved?
SECRETARY OF STATE MIKE POMPEO: We’ll have to take a look at that. I’m really focused on today. But Hugh, you do have to go back to other things that the Chinese Communist Party has committed to. They promised there’d be one country, two systems in Hong Kong, and yet they have expanded their repression there. They’ve promised that what was going on in the west, in Xinjiang, wasn’t harming the Muslim population, the Uighurs there in the West. We know what’s taking place. It’s a humanitarian catastrophe. Xi himself in the Rose Garden promised that they wouldn’t arm islands all across the South Pacific. They’ve done that. They’ve put significant weaponry there. And this is a country that the whole world needs to ensure that we watch what they do and not what they say. They want to be a great power. They want to join the community of civilized nations. To do that, you have to be open, you have to be transparent, you have to tell the truth. That’s our expectation of the Chinese Communist Party. And it has fallen short of that too often.
HEWITT: Doesn’t the world, though, need to respond in a coherent way, and taking back the Olympics is to me the most obvious display of condemnation of their lack of transparency, Mr. Secretary. Are there things like that on the drawing board?
POMPEO: So I’ve been in lots of conversations over the past, oh, three weeks or four weeks with colleagues all around the world, the President, too. He was on a call with all of these G-7 nations yesterday. There is enormous frustration, and not just with this incident, but with the growing challenges presented by a Chinese Communist Party that appears intent on failing to live up to its international obligations. I don’t know precisely what that response will be. But the time for accountability will come. And when we do that, we need to do it in a way that reflects the full scope of the problem set, not just what has occurred as a result of this pandemic, but the full problem set that it has presented. The President took it on. He saw that we had unfair trade relationship. We worked diligently to fix that. There are many dimensions to this challenge in the world. Not just the United States need to confront them in a way that delivers for the American people.
