Lecturing the host is poor guestmanship

As expected, China was high on the agenda when visiting US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab in London on Tuesday.

Within days, the United Kingdom has shut its door upon Huawei, China's telecom company, suspended its extradition treaty with Hong Kong, and expanded its weapons embargo to the city, partially to set the stage for Pompeo's visit.

Despite this, the fact that the top US diplomat met with some hard-line right wing politicians as well as several from the opposition Labour Party before his meeting with Johnson and Rabb, shows Pompeo wants to put pressure on the Johnson government to ensure it dances to Washington's tune on what he described beforehand as a shared security challenge for the US and the UK.

Although the recent moves the UK has taken have undoubtedly shaken the foundation of otherwise sound Sino-UK relations, so far their impacts on bilateral trade and cooperation have remained "calibrated", as Johnson said. China is still the UK's fifth-largest trade partner, and sixth-largest overseas market.

The bilateral trade between the UK and China has doubled over the past decade, and their cooperation on infrastructural construction, green finance, internationalization of the renminbi, and trade and investment under the Belt and Road Initiative remains promising. There is still plenty of potential to be tapped.

Even Raab, an anti-China vanguard in the administration, left the UK some wriggle room while announcing the immediate and indefinite suspension of the extradition treaty with Hong Kong in keenly stressing that "we want to work with China". Not to mention that Johnson－who vowed to continuously deepen cooperation with China in his telephone talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Feb 18 and March 23－has said that "I'm not going to be pushed into a position of becoming a knee-jerk Sinophobe on every issue".

Which is certainly not what Pompeo wants to hear. Which is why Pompeo is trying to turn the screws on the Johnson government to persuade it to follow the US lead in trying to decouple China from the rest of the world, while promising some compensation in terms of their transatlantic trade deal for any loss the UK may suffer by severing its ties with China.

The US has taken more out of the UK than the UK has taken out of it, and the proposed transatlantic trade deal will in all likelihood only reinforce that. Given that, it may not be as easy as Pompeo seems to think to get his hosts to agree to the "isolate China" strategy that Washington is trying to hawk to allies and acquaintances.