• 9: The Plot Against China? How Beijing Sees the New Washington Consensus, submitted on 2021-06-28 23:12:08+08:00.
• 10: The Emerging Biden Doctrine: Democracy, Autocracy, and the Defining Clash of Our Time, submitted on 2021-06-29 23:25:39+08:00.
• 11: A World Without American Democracy? The Global Consequences of the United States’ Democratic Backsliding, submitted on 2021-07-02 22:45:16+08:00.

9: The Plot Against China? How Beijing Sees the New Washington Consensus, submitted on 2021-06-28 23:12:08+08:00.

—– 9.1 —–2021-06-28 23:16:32+08:00:

[SS from the essay by Wang Jisi, President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University.]

The CCP’s official line remains that bilateral ties should be guided by the principle of “no conflict, no confrontation, mutual respect, and win-win cooperation,” as Chinese President Xi Jinping described it in his first telephone conversation with U.S. President Joe Biden, in February. Nevertheless, just as American views on China have hardened in recent years, so have many Chinese officials come to take a dimmer view of the United States. The conventional wisdom in Beijing holds that the United States is the greatest external challenge to China’s national security, sovereignty, and internal stability. Most Chinese observers now believe that the United States is driven by fear and envy to contain China in every possible way. And although American policy elites are clearly aware of how that view has taken hold in China, many of them miss the fact that from Beijing’s perspective, it is the United States—and not China—that has fostered this newly adversarial environment, especially by carrying out what the CCP views as a decades-long campaign of meddling in China’s internal affairs with the goal of weakening the party’s grip on power. Better understanding these diverging views of recent history would help the two countries find a way to manage the competition between them and avoid a devastating conflict that no one wants.

10: The Emerging Biden Doctrine: Democracy, Autocracy, and the Defining Clash of Our Time, submitted on 2021-06-29 23:25:39+08:00.

—– 10.1 —–2021-06-29 23:29:30+08:00:

[SS from the essay by Hal Brands, Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies]

The Biden foreign policy has been centered on putting this sweeping concept of American strategy—rooted in the inescapable fact that the supremacy of democracy is more imperiled than at any time in generations—into operation. Whereas many of Trump’s worst international relationships were with the United States’ closest allies, Biden has prioritized repairing those alliances as shields in a global democratic phalanx. He has sought to smooth diplomatic and trade disputes with Europe to create a stronger united front against Russia and China and has worked with allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific to signal that aggression against Taiwan could cost the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dearly. An early summit of the Group of 7 produced common language on the Chinese threat and plans for an infrastructure program that will promote transparent, high-quality projects in the developing world—a democratic answer to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

At home, Biden has been pursuing investments in scientific research and development, digital and physical infrastructure, and other areas to improve competitiveness and address working- and middle-class alienation. His promise of a “foreign policy for the middle class” is meant to show that global engagement can pay for working families, and his push for a global minimum tax would, administration officials argue, help democracies invest more in their citizens. From Biden’s perspective, these measures represent down payments on the sort of domestic rejuvenation and reform that once helped the democracies win another contest of systems during the Cold War.

11: A World Without American Democracy? The Global Consequences of the United States’ Democratic Backsliding, submitted on 2021-07-02 22:45:16+08:00.

—– 11.1 —–2021-07-02 22:50:32+08:00:

[SS from the article by Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.]

Many scholars of democracy perceived an unprecedented threat to U.S. democracy when Trump entered office in 2017 and feared grave assaults on the second and third legs of the democratic triad, in particular. This assessment was partially correct. Not since President Richard Nixon and rarely in U.S. history has there been such a determined effort to misuse and subvert administrative and rule-of-law institutions for nakedly political ends—but these attempts achieved only limited effect. The bulk of the press and the judiciary remained independent. The FBI avoided political capture. Outside the Republican Party and Trump’s own administration, freedom of speech thrived. From 2017 through 2020, liberty and the rule of law more or less held.

In three respects, however, most scholars misjudged the nature of the peril—and underestimated its gravity. First, many assumed that Trump himself constituted the biggest threat to U.S. democracy and that his defeat would lance the poisonous boil on the body politic. Second, with notable exceptions, including the Yale historian Timothy Snyder and the Carnegie Endowment scholar Rachel Kleinfeld, many underestimated the potential for violence on the part of Trump’s true-believing followers. And third, most underestimated the extent to which Trump would remake the Republican Party as an institution not only slavishly loyal to him but also hostile to democracy.