What was said in President Joe Biden's phone call earlier this week with Chinese leader Xi Jinping doesn't matter as much as whether his administration plans to back up its actions in the same way the Trump administration did, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday.
"For 50 years, the United States allowed the Chinese Communist Party to walk all over us," Pompeo told Fox News' Harris Faulkner. "All of this was under Republican and Democrat presidents alike. What gets said only matters to the extent the administration is prepared to back it up in the same way our administration was."
He continued that China had been spying and was engaged in unfair trade practices until the Trump administration enacted tariffs.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government has banned the BBC after an explosive story about alleged torture under Uighur concentration camps, and Pompeo said such actions are a "longstanding practice of the Chinese Communist Party.
"They have done the same thing to a handful of American reporters as well," said Pompeo. "They won't let their people know the truth of what's going on. That's how authoritarian regimes work. They want to deny that information and make sure they spread propaganda around the world."
He added that the BBC "had their facts right" on what is taking place.
"These are the kinds of atrocities, the kind of actions we have not seen in this world since the 1930s," said Pompeo. "The world has an obligation to respond to that. We talk about something like this never happens again and we need to make sure that it does not with all the energy that we have."
He also criticized Biden's plans to rejoin the Iranian nuclear deal, accusing him of taking the United States back to when it provided money to the foreign nation's ayatollahs.
"They sent $150 billion in pallets of cash to the Iranians," said Pompeo. "Our administration put economic sanctions in place that hurt the regime in Iran and denied them resources to commit the kinds of terror acts that we have seen them engage in."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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