Pompeo Warns of China’s Dangerous Undermining of U.S. Security

Former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo warned lawmakers Tuesday that China is dangerously undermining the U.S. by aligning with U.S. adversaries such as Russia, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela.

“Regimes in Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, and Caracas all owe their continued existence to the Chinese Communist Party,” Pompeo said during a hearing of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), adding each of those regimes has benefited by selling oil to China.

“China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela represent a new axis of evil regime that is pushing a dangerous model for the world,” he said. “One where personal and religious freedoms are curtailed and controlled by the state, where neighbors can be invaded, coerced and abused, and economic colonialism is the norm.”

Leon Panetta, like Pompeo a former Secretary of State and CIA director, also testified at the hearing and said China is exploiting global conflicts to promote a narrative of Western decline.

“China has taken every opportunity to undermine the United States and the West, to make us ‘pay’ for access to their markets by stealing our intellectual property, to conduct economic espionage, and to try to keep us out of the Pacific,” Panetta said.

Since Xi Jinping became general secretary of the CCP in 2012 and China’s president in 2013, Panetta said “China has been engaging in an ideological campaign, largely focused on the Global South, to garner goodwill while discrediting the United States and its allies.”

Pompeo said China’s model of governing, which it claims is supreme to all others, “is dangerous for the United States and humanity.”

“I do not point to these signs as evidence that it is a foregone conclusion our model will prevail – only to make clear that theirs will not,” Pompeo said. “But make no mistake, a weakened China, is an ever-growing danger to the United States and the world. 

“Whether the model of the free world will prevail depends on the United States. The question for us remains – to paraphrase what Abraham Lincoln stated so many years ago – will we be the author of our own destruction?”