The Battle Against Trumpism is Part of a Global Struggle Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

The Battle Against Trumpism is Part of a Global Struggle

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 3h

The Trump presidency is a constant illustration of those proverbs about “interesting times” and the curse of living during inflection points in history. When President Trump came to office he withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade regime focused on countering China. Trump pulled out of it as part of his greater hostility to multilateralism. But the TPP had already lost a great deal of support within the Democratic Party. Among Democrats, the argument was that it was a trade regime written to advantage corporations over labor, the environment, human rights, etc. The opposition certainly included a lot of traditional protectionism and it is often portrayed as such. But this is too simple and, in significant respects, a misleading explanation. Modern trade agreements are only partly about tariffs. They’re more whole commercial regimes — focused on intellectual property protections, technology transfers, endless rules of the road about the movements and regulation of capital and labor. But a broader point which now gets lost in the shuffle was that TPP was a multilateral agreement, which sought to bring in most of the states of the Pacific rim on terms defined by the U.S. as a counter to China.

Now we are in the grips of a deepening trade war which shows real signs of contributing to, if not necessarily causing, a coming recession. There’s renewed talk today about an “inverted yield curve,” a technical measure of the relationship between yields on bonds which has consistently signaled a coming recession for half a century. The White House signaled its own concern by pausing a group of planned tariffs in response to pressure from business but mostly, it seems, in an effort to ward off a steep recession hitting in the middle of Trump’s 2020 reelection.

A side note: people continue to marvel at how President Trump remains as popular as he is with a mix of unpopular policies, misrule, corruption and generally erratic behavior. A better way to look at is to note that whatever the underlying problems of the economy we’ve seen reasonably solid growth and robust job growth, not to mention a galloping stock market through Trump’s two-plus years in office. Those numbers usually make a President solidly popular. The fact that Trump has remained consistently unpopular with a robust economy is an amazing feat and signals the intensity of resistance to him. There’s every reason to think his popularity would drop precipitously if the economy went south.

But let’s go back to trade wars and trade agreements and geopolitics. Whatever harm we’re doing to ourselves, the trade conflict is clearly hurting China too. At the moment it seems that leaders on both sides may be too deep into this to manage a face-saving pull back.

Now let’s move to Hong Kong where weeks of demonstrations are accelerating with growing violence. PLA troops are being massed on the border of the Hong Kong SAR, raising fears of a Tiananmen-style crackdown not only to break the protests but presumably bring to an end the relative autonomy and separate legal regime of Hong Kong negotiated with United Kingdom before the 1997 handover. The UK is a secondary power now in the process of imploding and possibly suspending its own parliament to force an exit from the European Union. I say this simply to note that the Sino-British Joint Declaration (the treaty which created Hong Kong’s special status) has not international guarantor. It exists at China’s sufferance.

There are many forces in Washington today looking to foment a new Cold War with China or who see it as inevitable and thus want to prepare for it and thus create it. Some of this has existed on the American right for 25 years. You can go back to the early days of the Bush administration — before everything changed on a dime to the ‘War on Terror’ — when the big thing was China. There was a major international incident in April 2001 when Chinese jets intercepted an American EP-3 spy plane and forced it to land on Hainan Island. In general, I think these are bad forces in our politics to be resisted. It’s a big world and the U.S. and China have lots of economic complementarity and rivalries can often be managed or kicked down the road until other opportunities to manage them arise.

But there are basic conflicts, rivalries in our relationship with China. One is obviously economic. We are the incumbent economic superpower. They are the rising one. We each want global systems modeled on our preferred systems and advantaging us. There is also an ideological conflict. And here it is not so much us against China. Indeed, it is not entirely clear which side we are on ourselves.

I’m talking about the global contest between autocracy and authoritarianism on the one hand and democracy and civic, rule-of-law based societies on the other. China, Russia, Turkey, Brazil, India, the Philippines are part of a post-Cold War alternative autocratic model. A similar contest is playing out within the EU. Some of these countries are structurally autocratic and others like Brazil or India or Turkey may simply be passing through authoritarian phases. Regardless they all have common characteristics: authoritarian rule, personality cults, state and party management of domestic economies aimed at supporting the governing party’s hold on power, often the standard authoritarian focus on domestic enemies. Trump is part and parcel of this because the global slide to autocracy is joined at the hip to the rise of oligarchism, secret financial partnerships and extortion.

Beyond all these particulars a central question around the globe today is whether democracies are better at providing the mix of prosperity, stability and freedom that global populations want. This question is central to Russian propaganda operations in Europe, North America and around the globe: the argument that democracies are fraudulent and weak. In a different way it is central to China’s push for global economic sway and soft power. It is hard not to look at China’s explosive building sprees and glittering new skylines compared to America’s reeling infrastructure and not think they may have a point. Maybe authoritarianism does deliver the goods better than democracy?

Step back from all these particulars of the moment and we can see a common thread. America’s standing in the world, global influence, power, prosperity are all tied up in its association with civic government, democracy and the rule of law. If China move into Hong Kong in force and kills hundreds or thousands of people it will spread a wave of menace and fear across East Asia. Certainly it will in Taiwan but also in other states that China may not see as part of China but still as logically within its sphere of influence. We are in no position as a country to be the counter to that if we don’t clearly stand for something different, even if inconsistently or imperfectly. We’ve also surrendered the international agreement structure that was designed to act as a counter to it. Indeed, we are, as all this unfolds, alternatively shaking down regional allies like South Korea and Japan while bizarrely kowtowing to the most backwards and brutal state in the region. We can see similar breakdowns and patterns across Eurasia and in Latin America.

My point here is not that the United States should embrace the democracy brand as a tool for global primacy, though on its own terms it probably should. My point is that the globe is currently in a contest between rightist autocracies and rule of law democracies. And the only great power with the heft to make it a contest is the United States. China, Russia are in authoritarian camp for the indefinite future. India is at least for the moment. Indeed, for now under Trump, it’s not clear which side the U.S. is even on.

We should all look to these broader patterns and be cognizant of the fact that the battle against Trumpism in the United States is part of a global struggle between authoritarianism and democracy.

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