In the recent reports about the preferences of Russia and China in the upcoming American presidential election, there is hidden some apparent news that’s important but that seems to have gone unnoticed.
The main points reported by the Washington Post are two: 1) the Russians are again meddling in the election to help Trump win, and 2) the Chinese would prefer that Trump lose because he’s “unpredictable.”
It has been noted that framing the intelligence in that way combines telling the American people some things worth their knowing with inappropriately casting the information in a way helpful to the liar for whom the intelligence services work, i.e. President Trump. “Inappropriate” because such a presentation conveys a phony balance — one big power favors Trump, the other big power favors Biden. That balance is “phony” because Russia’s interference can in no way be equated with China’s preference.
But it has not been noted (as far as I know) that China’s preference shows — or at least suggests — something reassuring about the nature of the Chinese regime. Here’s how:
First, it could hardly be clearer that Trump’s presidency does serious damage to American power and American standing in the world. He’s been dismantling the main structures of American global power and influence.
Second, in addition to how Trump seems particularly eager to do Putin’s bidding (for whatever reasons), that systematic damage to America’s long status as “the world’s one remaining superpower” is key to why Putin wanted him in the Presidency and wants him there still. Putin’s goal has been to restore Russia to the former status of the Soviet Union, i.e. as a more or less equal rival for global dominance. Taking the United States down a peg or two or three is essential to achieving that goal of Putin’s.
Third, it is China more than Russia that, as this point, is more fully in a position to rival the United States for global power. Whereas Russia’s economy is roughly the same size of just the economy of the state of Texas, China’s economy (by some measures) has surpassed that of the entire United States.
Fourth, China is clearly ready to flex some muscle — e.g. in Hong Kong and in the South China Sea (and is threatening the autonomy of Taiwan, which it claims — and has been extending its influence in softer ways around the world. While China has not done the equivalent to the Russian military incursions into Georgia and into the Ukraine (including the seizure of Crimea), some American analysts of international affairs worry that between China and the United States a “new Cold War” may be brewing, with all the dangers that entails.
All of which sets the stage for a reassuring inference that can tentatively be drawn from the recent reports that China wants Trump out:
China’s disfavoring Trump for his “unpredictability” implies that the Chinese regime desires stability in the international system more than it desires the weakening of its American rival.
If that inference is correct, that’s good news because it suggests that the kind of world the Chinese want is in much greater alignment with what has been what the United States has sought for more than a century. (As a “status quo” power, as a believer that stabilizing the world is in the interests of humankind generally, the U.S. has worked to establish the kinds of order that foster “predictability” and prevent dangerous destabilization of the system.)
China’s preference to get rid of Trump suggests that as a rival to the U.S. it is not the kind of destabilizing expansionist power the Soviet Union was, and that Putin’s Russia is. And that means that the “new Cold War” some have feared looks less likely to come to pass.
