The new U.S. administration should stand firm when dealing with Beijing and avoid falling into the communist regime’s crafty “negotiation traps,” a former White House security official has said. “Don’t fall for a trap that Beijing sets time and again for administration after administration, which is to try to lure the United States into a long, formal, mid-level bottoms-up negotiation,” said former deputy National Security advisor Matthew Pottinger in his first public speech since leaving the White House in January. Pottinger, whose role was central to forging the Trump administration’s China policy, made the remarks during a Feb. 3 panel hosted by Florida International University’s Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs. He said that the former White House cabinet only learnt “not to let China draw out the clock” after a year of back and forth negotiations, and after reviewing the previous dialogues of the last two …