U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took fresh aim at China on Thursday and said Washington and its allies must use "more creative and assertive ways" to press the Chinese Communist Party to change its ways, calling it the "mission of our time."

Speaking at the Nixon Library in former President Richard Nixon's birthplace in Yorba Linda, California, Pompeo said the late U.S. leader's worry about what he had done by opening the world to China's Communist Party in the 1970s had been prophetic.

"President Nixon once said he feared he had created a 'Frankenstein' by opening the world to the CCP," Pompeo said. "And here we are."