Five Eyes Alliance: As Pompeo departs, let responsibility return

"He who pays the Danegeld, never gets rid of the Dane", said Rudyard Kipling, the English author. Anyone, therefore, who imagines that the appeasement of a bully will bring harmony, is in for a shock. The United Kingdom government, unfortunately, has now learned this lesson the hard way.

On January 28, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, defied the US President, Donald Trump, and announced that he would not ban Huawei from the UK's 5G network. Instead, he decided that the company would be allowed to acquire a share of up to 35 percent in non-sensitive areas of the network. The US reaction, however, was immediate, with Trump's spokesman announcing that “the United States is disappointed by the UK's decision". The US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, was more forthright, and told Johnson to take a “relook", which, once the thumb screws were applied, he duly did.

On July 14, Johnson, desperate for a post-Brexit trade deal with the US, formally capitulated, and pledged to end Huawei's involvement by 2027. Ever since, Pompeo has had him exactly where he wants him. If Johnson imagined that once he had caved in over Huawei the US would then back off, he was in for a rude awakening.

Although the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US, was originally a partnership of equals, all that has now changed. Not only is it dominated by the US, but its intelligence gathering mandate has been altered. Given his anti-China fixation, Pompeo sees the Five Eyes as a grouping which can be used to destabilize China, and he has molded his partners into accepting his own mindset.

After the National Security Law for Hong Kong was enacted on June 30, in order to end subversion and terrorist attacks in the city, as well as to deter foreign interference in its affairs, Pompeo, anticipating a loss of influence, announced various reprisals. His declared aim was to damage Hong Kong, hoping that this would also weaken China, such being the overriding objective of US foreign policy. When Pompeo demanded that his partners follow suit, they fell over themselves in their rush to obey. Not only were some of them, like New Zealand and the UK, eager to sign trade deals with the US, but they were all desperate to avoid his displeasure. Even though they have tough national security laws of their own, none of them batted an eyelid when told to put the boot into Hong Kong. They readily suspended their extradition treaties with the city, blocked the export of strategic materials, issued travel advisories, and even encouraged citizens and businesses to leave the city, which delighted Pompeo.

First out of the traps, unsurprisingly, was the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, who has embraced Pompeo's anti-China narrative from the outset. He declared that, following the enactment of the National Security Law, “one country, two systems" was threatened, when, of course, the reverse was true. It was precisely because Hong Kong lacked its own national security laws that hostile forces were able to exploit the resulting void, using the city as a base to destabilize China. Although the new law now provides Hong Kong with the means to protect itself, Trudeau's reaction, taken straight out of the Pompeo playbook, was to suspend the return of fugitive offenders, and to ban the export of sensitive military items.

In a desperate bid to justify Trudeau's behavior, his Foreign Minister, Francois-Philippe Champagne, even went so far as to claim that China had “demonstrated disregard for Hong Kong's Basic Law and high degree of autonomy promised for Hong Kong under the ‘one country, two systems' framework". This, of course, was risible, and it showed that he was wholly unaware that in China, as in Canada, the ultimate responsibility for national security lies not with a regional assembly, but with the national parliament. Since the Hong Kong government had, because of the violence, been unable to enact its own laws to protect national security, the only way in which “one country, two systems" could survive was if the Central Authorities acted to protect the city from the threats it faced.

No country, however, was more eager to please Pompeo than Australia, previously regarded as one of Hong Kong's best friends. Its Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, who had already banned Huawei as a sop to the US, announced a brutal series of measures against Hong Kong, designed not only to undermine its legal system, but also to cripple its economy. Apart from suspending fugitive surrender arrangements, he warned Australians against visiting Hong Kong, conjuring up a dystopian vision of tourists being arrested on vague charges under the National Security Law, and then whisked away to Beijing for trial. He also encouraged local businesses to relocate to Australia, while promising students a pathway to citizenship in his own country.

On August 9, moreover, the Five Eyes sank to a new low, when they condemned Hong Kong for postponing its Legislative Council elections, scheduled for September 6, for a year, due to Covid-19 concerns. The government's decision, however, was identical to that taken by, for example, the UK government, where local and mayoral elections, scheduled for May 5, were also postponed for a year, to protect the public. The Five Eyes condemnation was, therefore, not only rank hypocrisy, but also a shocking insight into the depths to which the alliance has sunk under Pompeo's tutelage.

Given their track record, therefore, it came as no surprise when, on November 19, the Five Eyes once again weighed in, this time demanding the reinstatement of four legislators who had been expelled from the Legislative Council in Hong Kong. This was because, as potential candidates in the postponed elections, they had not satisfied the eligibility criteria in terms of their declarations to uphold the Basic Law and pledge allegiance to the Region. Among the reasons given by the Returning Officers were their calls for foreign governments to interfere in China's affairs, harm Hong Kong's economy and penalize its officials, something no other country would ever tolerate. Indeed, conduct of this type is also prosecutable in Hong Kong, as elsewhere in the common law world, as misconduct in public office, and criminal investigations may already be underway.

With Trump's defeat, however, Pompeo's days are now numbered, and there are already signs of a re-appraisal occurring within the Five Eyes itself. Much of what the alliance has been doing during Pompeo's time has aroused deep disquiet, if not disgust, and the voices of reason are once again starting to make themselves heard. In Australia, for example, the former foreign minister, Bob Carr, when interviewed on November 24, traced his country's adversarial approach to China to “a flamboyant lack of diplomacy" in 2017, when former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull gave his backing to the US military build-up in the region. He noted that Australia saw itself as “the closest American ally to Washington", and that it had “deliberately tilted against China". This, he added, had been done with “an almost flamboyant heavy-handedness", with Australian diplomacy having been “spectacularly incompetent".

Indeed, as Pompeo, the puppet master, prepares to exit, there are already indications that some of his closest devotees are themselves reviewing things. On November 23, for example, Morrison, addressing the UK Policy Exchange, surprised observers by announcing that Australia wants “mutually beneficial" relations with both China and the US, and even denied that his country is a US lapdog. However, realizing that Pompeoism is coming to an end, he told the incoming US administration of Joe Biden that Australia should not be asked to pick sides between Washington and Beijing, something he would not have dared to say in Pompeo's heyday.

With Pompeo's departure, the Five Eyes will hopefully end its policy of targeting Hong Kong and confronting Beijing. Tactics like these are redolent of a bygone era, when China was weak, and they will inevitably backfire. Diplomacy and decency are always preferable to blackmail and hypocrisy, and the Five Eyes should now start showing that it knows how to behave responsibly.

The author is a senior counsel, law professor and criminal justice analyst, and was previously the Director of Public Prosecutions of the HKSAR.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.