US election: China, Iran and New York Times share hope Joe Biden will defeat Donald Trump
What do The New York Times, the Communist Party of China and the mullahs’ regime in Iran have in common? They are all desperately keen to see Donald Trump defeated.
They are the anti-Trump axis, the coalition of the concerned and conniving, a historic entente across ideologies and world views.
What do The New York Times (and the whole US liberal establishment), the Communist Party of China and the mullahs’ regime that rules Iran have in common?
They are all desperately keen to see Donald Trump defeated this week.
All right thinking left/liberal, woke opinion, plus the Leninist peer rival of the US for global leadership and hegemony, plus the most aggressive regime in the Middle East which officially designates the US as “the great Satan”, all think their lives would be better without Trump to boss them around.
The US intelligence community has accused Beijing and Tehran of attempting to interfere in US politics through social media posts and hacking.
William Evanina, the head of the US National Counter-Intelligence and Security Centre, said “China prefers President Trump — whom Beijing sees as unpredictable — does not win re-election”.
Veteran China politics analyst Willy Lam of Hong Kong University said in a press interview: “The Communist Party would still prefer (Joe) Biden even though there is a very solid bipartisan consensus between the two parties to restrain China’s influence, technologically and geopolitically. Biden will be more stable than Trump and he may not push so hard.”
Evanina said Iran believes a second Trump term will result “in a continuation of US pressure on Iran in an effort to foment regime change”.
Microsoft identified an Iranian group, Phosphorous, as trying to hack White House email accounts.
None of this proves Trump should be re-elected, but it is surely worth pausing to ask this question: if the Trump presidency hastens American decline, as the New York Times and all his domestic liberal critics argue, then why is that the two national governments in the world which would most benefit from US decline very much want to see the end of him?
In fairness, it must be acknowledged that US intelligence also believes the Russians are once again trying to interfere in American politics and they would apparently like to see Biden lose.
There’s no doubt the Russians interfered in the last US election and they wanted Hillary Clinton to lose. Right-wingers who deny that simply shred their own credibility. There is no evidence the Russians had a material effect on the election outcome, and their motive may have been to sow division as much as to advance Trump.
But just as some dictatorships, such as China and Iran, loathe Trump, some love him. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, who achieved one of Pyongyang’s historic diplomatic objectives in his series of pretty kooky summits with Trump, has, since the two “fell in love” in Trump’s words, never authorised a word of criticism of the President.
But Beijing and Tehran are shrewd guardians of their own regime interests and they believe Trump hurts them.
Trump has withdrawn from the weak and ineffective nuclear agreement with Iran, and put Iran under maximum sanctions pressure. This has two purposes: to contain Iran in the short term and to move it towards a more useful deal in the medium term.
Trump’s administration has called out Beijing’s norm-busting behaviour in trade, intellectual property, its treatment of Hong Kong, and its intimidation of Taiwan in a way no other US leader has.
Trump has also increased the US military budget. Beijing hates this, because there’s one thing it cares about more than US soft power and that’s US hard power.
Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping has made a characteristically hollow promise to make China carbon-neutral by the science fiction date of 2060, just the sort of never/never, la/la stuff The New York Times and the liberal establishment, and much of the Biden world, will love.
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