No room for Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley in Trump 2.0 White House

Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of state known for a hawkish stance on China, will not be on Donald Trump's top team when the president-elect returns to the White House in January.

Also ruled out is Nikki Haley, ambassador to the United Nations under the first Trump administration.

In a social media post on Saturday, US time, Trump said that Haley, who ran against him in the Republican Party primaries, and Pompeo, also CIA director in the first Trump term, would not be joining his administration.

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"I will not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump Administration," the president-elect wrote.

"I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our Country," he added.

This came as news broke that Trump had won Arizona, thus winning all seven swing states and sealing his landslide victory in the presidential election.

His stunning political comeback became clear not long after the vote closed last Tuesday, and behind the scenes groundwork was launched to assemble the team for his second term.

Pompeo served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Trump between 2017 and 2018 before being named secretary of state, a post he held until 2021.

His name had been put forward by some US media outlets as a possible candidate for defence secretary under Trump 2.0.

Pompeo is a long-term critic of China and one of the most hawkish US officials in terms of relations with the country. In a speech delivered in 2020, he labelled the past five decades of US-China engagement as a "failure".

"The kind of engagement we have been pursuing has not brought the kind of change in China that President [Richard] Nixon hoped to induce", he said at the time, referring to the former Republican president's historic 1972 trip to China that led to the establishment of formal diplomatic relations seven years later.

China was a clear threat to the world, Pompeo added, saying "Beijing's actions threaten our people and our prosperity".

Pompeo also criticised Beijing for its attempts to quell the unrest in Hong Kong in 2019 and criticised the imposition of the national security law in the city the following year.

In mid-2020, Pompeo certified to the US Congress that Hong Kong no longer enjoyed a high degree of autonomy from Beijing. This resulted in the US revoking Hong Kong's special trading status, endangering its position as a global financial centre.

Washington also imposed sanctions in August 2020 on then Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, and 10 other senior Beijing and Hong Kong officials, alleging a crackdown on free speech and political freedoms in the city.

China's western region of Xinjiang has been another point of contention in bilateral relations. Pompeo in 2020 endorsed US sanctions on multiple officials over alleged human rights violations targeting the minority Muslim population. Beijing has repeatedly rejected the accusations.

Trump has been getting his core team together since the election outcome became clear early on Wednesday, US time.

On Friday, he appointed campaign co-manager Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff. Reuters reports that Robert O'Brien, who served as a national security adviser in the first Trump term, is a contender for the next secretary of state.

In 2021, Beijing imposed sanctions on a group of senior Trump officials, including O'Brien and Pompeo, accusing them of meddling in China's domestic affairs and destabilising US-China relations.

Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, strongly criticised Trump during the primaries, including labelling him as "unhinged". She eventually endorsed him at the party's national convention in July.

The level of Trump's confrontational approach to China over the next four years could largely depend on whom he picks for his cabinet.

Haley is also widely seen as a China hawk. Her hardline approach was reiterated in September 2023, when she said: "Yes, I view China as an enemy."

She said the United States needed to "make sure that we're serious about China and they know that we're serious about them - not going and being nice to them and thinking that they're going to change."

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright ? 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2024. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.