Mike Pompeo pulls no punches on China

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Tokyo on Tuesday. Picture: AFP

Didn’t US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have a fun day out in Japan this week?

In a previous American ­administration, Pompeo’s bombastic 24 hours in Tokyo would have raised eyebrows. But four years into the Trump administration, it was almost just ­another Tuesday, albeit one on which the second foreign ministers’ meeting of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue was held.

The diplomatic grouping, better known as the Quad, has long been championed by Japan and, for not quite as long, Australia and the US. India has been its most hesitant member.

Beijing’s leaders have long suspected the grouping is a ­response to China’s rise. They are not wrong. But still Japanese, Australian and Indian officials go to great lengths to promote it as something broader than a containment club.

Pompeo, less so. Take his ­address at the Quad’s opening, given in front of an assembled Tokyo press pack.

“When we met, now last year, the landscape was very different. We couldn’t have imagined the pandemic that came from Wuhan,” Pompeo said, finally free of his stars-and-stripes face mask.

“That crisis was made infinitely worse by the Chinese Communist Party’s cover-up. The regime’s authoritarian ­nature led its leaders to lock up and silence the very brave Chinese citizens who were raising the alarm.”

Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne tried a sunnier tone. “The Quad has a positive agenda,” she said, speaking after Pompeo’s dark address.

“It’s a diplomatic network that assists us as democracies to align ourselves in support of shared interests.”

Payne did not mention China once in her speech. Australia’s largest trading partner was also never directly named in her ­official account of the two-hour meeting, which then ran into dinner. India and Japan were also careful to never directly name China.

Pompeo and the gang instead took an “America first” approach.

They even enlisted Australia’s Foreign Minister in a summary of her 45-minute head-to-head with Pompeo, held before the formal Quad meeting.

“The Secretary and the Foreign Minister also discussed their shared concerns regarding the People’s Republic of China’s malign activity in the region,” said one of Pompeo’s staff in a readout helpfully posted on the US Department of State website.

Pompeo was even more freewheeling in an interview with Nikkei Asia, in which he seemed to suggest the Quad could be ­expanded “at the appropriate time … to build out a true security framework, a fabric that can counter the challenge that the Chinese Communist Party presents to all of us”.

That idea seemed to be news to his three counterparts.

Perhaps too much can be made of the difference in tone between America and the other three members of the Quad.

The four do have a lot of shared interests — even more so after Xi Jinping’s hardline international policy since the COVID-19 outbreak.

Indian Foreign Minister ­Subrahmanyam Jaishankar captured that well in his opening ­remarks. “The fact that we are meeting here today in person ­despite a global pandemic is a testimony to the importance that these consultations have gained, particularly in recent times. Our world, you will all agree, is significantly different today than what it was when we met last year in New York in September,” he said.

A new poll by the Pew ­Research Centre documents how far the backlash against China extends beyond the Quad’s membership. But as the 2020 budget papers in Canberra also document, China is much more than a security threat.

It is also a big, difficult, highly sensitive economic partner for whom words are bullets, as Pompeo knows well.