While India decided independently to ban more than 50 Chinese apps recently as part of its campaign to punish Beijing for the Galwan clashes, the United States on Wednesday indicated it played an enabling role with its ongoing effort to “assist” New Delhi with information it needed to make the right choices.
No details were forthcoming . But the United States has been considering a ban on some of these same apps such as TikTok, a video sharing app, as has been said by both President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as they ratchet up their attacks on China over a growing list of disagreements.
“We’ve been working closely with the Indians across a broad spectrum of the – the full range of international partnership with them to assist them in making sure they had all the information they needed to make good decisions,” Secretary of State Michael R Pompeo said in an interaction hosted by the Economic Club of New York, a non-profit.
Pompeo was responding to a question if America was alone in confronting China over its trade “thievery”, using his own words, “lies” in the South China Sea, and its attempt to leverage its outsized clout in the WHO to escape accountability for the Covid-19 pandemic that started in Wuhan last December.
“They made the decision that they were going to pull 50 or so Chinese applications off the systems that were operating inside of India,” the secretary of state said of the Indian decision on the Chinese apps, and added, “They didn’t do that because the United States told them to. They did it because they could see the threat to the Indian people from the Chinese Communist Party.”
Pompeo, who is spearheading the Trump administration’s growing hawkishness on China, went on to indicate the United States may have played a similar enabling role in United Kingdom’s ban on Huawei from its 5G network Tuesday, reversing its long-held position that had caused frustration in the United States which has declared the telecommunications giant with links to Beijing a national security risk.
The United Kingdom changed its policy with respect to its 5G technology, Pompeo said “not because America browbeat them” but because “it conducted a thorough analysis based on a set of information, some of which we certainly were helpful as part of the Five Eyes coalition to collect and disseminate”.
“Five Eyes” is an intelligence sharing alliance of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Defense ministers of the member countries called last month for “a stable, rules-based, global order”, using a phrase that is deployed by foreign ministries around the world as a rallying cry against the Chinese.
A response was awaited from the state department to a request for more details about the “assist” from the United States, as indicated by Secretary Pompeo.