Excuse Me. Who Exactly is Mike Pompeo Referring to When He Talks About “The Free World?”

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, July 23, 2020, in Yorba Linda, California. Ashley Landis / POOL / AFP

I’m afraid I’ve devolved into the kind of person who checks Twitter before even putting on my glasses in the morning. On good days it jolts me out of my lockdown torpor at least long enough to make coffee. On bad days it makes me want to hide under the bed.

We’ve seen several of those days this week alone. Was it only a day or two ago that Chinese consulate workers in Houston were holding document bonfires? Because since then the US consulate in Chengdu also got the chop. And then there was US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech at the Richard Nixon Library, in which he called on ‘free nations’ to tackle China’s ‘tyranny’: ‘If the free world doesn’t change Communist China, Communist China will change us.’

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by Cobus van Staden

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