The juxtaposition is appalling — as China’s muscular President Xi Jinping flouts liberal norms by imposing unilateral security laws on Hong Kong that deny its freedom, in the US Donald Trump succumbs to domestic woes from an erupting culture war and a raging pandemic.
How goes the dinner conversation among the Chinese leaders?
Xi is pledged to China’s rejuvenation, economic success, effective governance, party control and an end to two centuries of humiliation and civil war. What he sees in the dominant superpower is a blundering leader, ineffective in government, unable to combat the coronavirus, wrestling against a so-called cultural revolution and the unresolved legacy of its civil war.
The only compensation is that it can’t be as bad as it looks. Surely. The Chinese elite knows power, having used and abused power since its 1949 revolutionary victory. It knows about the US’s hard power but it also knows how the internal fortitude on which power depends can sink into ruin.
The Chinese would have long known what former national security adviser John Bolton, a conservative hardliner, has revealed in his book The Room Where it Happened — that a pathetic Trump asked Xi to help him win this year’s election by boosting agricultural purchases from the US; that Trump signalled his approval of China’s imprisonment of a million Uighur Muslims, telling Xi that building more camps was “the right thing to do” (a claim Trump denies); and that a narcissistic Trump thrived on praise from authoritarian leaders, with Xi telling him he wanted Trump to amend the constitution so he could stay in office longer.
Xi was surely serious about wanting a longer Trump presidency. Bolton reveals that a reckless Trump decided to tell allies at a NATO summit he would make history and have the US quit the security treaty because they wouldn’t spend more on defence, only to change his mind. But Beijing wouldn’t have been surprised by that either.
Bolton says the advisers lived in fear of what concessions Trump would make to Xi in meetings where none knew what the President might say next. Watching Trump bluster his way through the Trump-Xi dinner at the Buenos Aires summit, Bolton wrote: “The Chinese probably hoped the dinner would go on all night.” Trump, of course, declared it a triumph. Everything is a triumph, notably the fight against COVID-19.
China’s elite understands weakness. It knows it is dealing with a weak President who is undermining the organs of US governance. Bolton reveals a President ready to bargain on anything but without any sense of value. Bolton confirms what we know: Trump has no grasp of governing competence or of great-power strategic competition. He was elected on a platform to terminate America’s post-war global leadership role, disrupt its alliances, promote protectionism and retreat from international bodies.
He has made progress on each count. And the big winner will be China.
It is difficult to gauge how dangerous is the present situation. China, the rising superpower, is surely riddled with the most astonishing contradictions in world history: it is totalitarian but efficient, communist but capitalist, technologically savvy but politically neutered. Yet it is the contradictions in the US that are today’s story.
Burdened by a President whose behaviour parades its flaws and hides its strengths, the US is undergoing an introspective moment, facing a divisive presidential election and gripped in medical and economic crises of historic magnitude. Six months into COVID-19, the impression is that Xi has outsmarted Trump. This may not be the final chapter.
There is, however, no gainsaying the extent of US humiliation. Trump’s tragedy is that he came to office convinced that China was “gaming” the global arrangements but he lacked any strategic sense about how to address this. Now he faces a world where a virus, originating in China, has killed more Americans than people from any other nation and has exposed the US’s social disunity, defective political leadership, weak public administration and lack of community resilience.
US analyst Francis Fukuyama wrote in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs that when the role of government has assumed a new pre-eminence in the fight against the pandemic, Trump’s singular contribution has been to “block the state from functioning effectively”. This is exactly one of Bolton’s pre-virus critiques. Trump, by his failures, is reminding libertarians of an iron law of politics: if government is dysfunctional, a country is dysfunctional.
“The pandemic has shone a bright light on existing institutions everywhere, revealing their inadequacies and weaknesses,” Fukuyama wrote. “It was the country’s singular misfortune to have the most incompetent and divisive leader in its modern history at the helm when the crisis hit. Having spent his term at war with the state he heads, he was unable to deploy it effectively when the situation demanded. American underperformance during the pandemic has several causes but the most significant has been a national leader who has failed to lead.”
Fukuyama said it was apparent why some nations had done better than others. Three factors defined success against the pandemic — a competent state apparatus, a government that citizens trust, and leadership. He argues China “will benefit from this crisis at least in relative terms”. It is a restrained but pessimistic judgment.
The virus will have many geo-strategic consequences that still defy prediction, but one obvious legacy is the sharper rift and deeper competition between the US and China. They are now engaged in a stress test before the world of their competing systems to see who can minimise deaths and accumulate prestige.
Trump is a bad advertisement for democracy. His pandemic performance is probably an even worse advertisement. Xi’s hypocrisy is monumental but he seems to operate in a grey zone, in the shadow of cover provided by Trump. So Xi promotes China as the beacon of generosity offering help to other nations in resisting the virus, while choking freedom from Hong Kong and displaying his contempt for international rules and legal agreements.
The US’s contradictions get more attention, but China’s contradictions are far larger. How much it is damaged by COVID-19 and the economic aftermath is still unclear. But the pivotal Chinese dilemma remains: how to build a modern creative state when denying personal freedom, rule of law and political accountability. How long before the defects in China’s authoritarian model come to the surface? The history of Communist Party states drives its internal paranoia — the state looks unshakeable until, at the end, the unravelling comes quickly.
There will be, however, an earlier US unravelling of sorts: the Trump accountability syndrome. Trump was elected to redraw the economic balance between the US and China. His pledge “to make America great again” came in a China context — Trump would teach China a lesson, transfer Chinese jobs to the US heartland, demonstrate the superiority of the US system and enshrine the country as No 1.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
The COVID-19 crisis accentuates trends that were already long under way. It invites two possible contradictory scenarios — confirmation of US relative decline or the trigger that provokes a US post-Trump resurgence. But the commentators are deeply gloomy.
In the Financial Times, the newspaper’s US correspondent, Ed Luce, believes post Cold War victory hubris — the legend of the Reagan-Thatcher era breaking the Soviets — has engendered a cultural overconfidence.
“After the pride comes the fall,” he says. If the leaders of the Anglo-American world, the US and Britain, are being humbled, Luce notes the junior partners, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, still display Anglophone competence and common sense.
As for Fukuyama, searching for an optimistic note, he wrote: “Democracy, capitalism and the United States have all proved capable of transformation and adaptation before.” But this time they will need, once again, “to pull a rabbit out of the hat”.
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