US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that China has deployed 60,000 soldiers at the LAC, and India “absolutely need the United States to be their ally and partner in this fight”.
Foreign ministers from Quad countries — the US, India, Australia and Japan — met in Tokyo earlier this week for the first session in person since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“They’ve (China) stacked 60,000 soldiers against the Indians in the north,” Pompeo told Fox News in one of three interviews after returning to the US. “When the Australians had the temerity to ask for an investigation of the Wuhan virus and where it began, something that we know a lot about, the Chinese Communist Party threatened them. They bullied them.
“We need partners and friends. They’ll certainly try to react. But what the Chinese Communist Party had become accustomed to, frankly, for an awfully long time was watching America bend a knee, watching us turn the other cheek and appease them.”
Pompeo said the Quad countries were developing policies to counter threats posed by China posed to the four nations. “(India) absolutely need the United States to be their ally and partner in this fight,” he told Larry O’Connor.
Sounding optimistic about the fight against China, Pompeo said: “The world has awakened. The tide’s begun to turn. And the United States under President Trump’s leadership has now built out a coalition that will push back against the threat and maintain good order, the rule of law, and the basic civic decency that comes from democracies controlling the world and not authoritarian regimes.”
