NATO confronted by China’s efforts to undermine its security: Pompeo

NEW YORK, Nov 16, 2019, TASS. NATO is confronted by China’s efforts to undermine its security, US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said on Friday at the Rice University in Texas, TASS reported.

“One of the things NATO is looking at today is: How does NATO deal with China? You don’t think about it as an organization designed to do that, but the cyber threat isn’t geographically limited. NATO is confronted by Chinese efforts to undermine its security, its communications security. And so we’re mindful that the organization has to evolve,” Pompeo said.

“So it’s a complex challenge with China, a challenge that has similarities to what — to challenges America has faced before from authoritarian regimes, but different in material respects as well. We’ve never had another nation that had five times as many people as we had and an economy that is the scale of what the Chinese had that is interconnected to our economy as ours is with China today,” he added.

“It is absolutely the case that we have — the people of China are working to make their lives better, and what we’re confronting today is a challenge from the Chinese Communist Party, which has also changed even in the last handful of years and engaged in activity that is deeply inconsistent with not only what I think is best for the world or what America thinks is the best for the world, but inconsistent with what they have promised,” he noted.

“So in the first instance, we need the Chinese Communist Party to behave in a way that is consistent with the commitments that they have made, and then we need to make sure that everyone understands the challenges that China presents,” he stressed.