Donald Trump has praised Chinese leader Xi Jinping over his handling of the protests in Hong Kong, after a weekend that saw police fire tear gas at demonstrators and a mob launched a vicious attack on pro-democracy campaigners. The US president told reporters at a White House meeting with Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister, that the weeks of protests had been “relatively non-violent”, adding that Mr Xi should be applauded for letting them continue. “I think [China] could stop them if they wanted . . . I’m not involved in it very much but I think President Xi of China has acted responsibly, very responsibly,” he said. The comments come after the Financial Times reported earlier this month that Mr Trump agreed to tone down criticism of Beijing’s approach to the protests in order to revive talks to resolve the US-China trade war.--Primrose Riordan and Nicolle Liu reporting in the Financial Times, July 23, 2019.
An idea going back to the ancient Greeks is that (among Greek city-states) democratic regimes support each other, while oligarchic regimes instinctively offer mutual aid. (Part of the empirical support for the idea was the Athenian practice to install democratic leaning regimes in places they conquered and the Spartan practice to install olicharchic regimes in places they controlled.) The idea has had an after-life in the liberal faith (articulated by Addison and Kant) that liberal democracies tend toward peace with each other; just as the post-Napoleonic restoration involved monarchies supporting monarchies. During the cold war the idea was transformed to mutual support among liberal democracies and (against) among communist states.
There are sufficiently large number of exceptions to such generalizations, to treat these as mere tendencies. Even so, at various moments one may be tempted into thinking that for democracies, grounded on the normative ideal of equality, the support of democracy elsewhere is itself an important interest that guides their statecraft. From that vantage point, one non-trivial blemish (recall) on President Obama's record is the collapse of the Arab Spring on his watch (alongside the disastrous support for the Saudi war-machine in Yemen). Given the importance of American weapons and cash to the Egyptian army, his Administration was more than merely complicit in the downfall of the only legitimately, democratically elected Egyptian President (the recently deceased Mohamed Morsi).
For many democratic leaders, their legitimacy is grounded in being elected by the people. And this gives them, in their own eyes, legitimacy in the eyes of others. Why this would be so may be hard to say, but presumably it appeals to the egalitarian thought that each of us have a respect for the consent and judgment of others as we would expect them to have it for ours. If the contrast is a (divine) right grounded in the accidents of birth or arms, this may well survive some scrutiny. To disparage democracy would be self-undermining to a certain democratic leader.
In the paragraph above the previous one, I use 'interest' to grant that democracies treat the achievement of democracy elsewhere legitimately as defeasible. There will be circumstances in which a democratic state naturally sacrifices the democratic aspirations of others to reach vital objectives (e.g., survival, prevention of dangerous war, avoid enormous economic damage, etc.). Sometimes pro-democracy rhetoric only incites aspirations that can only be best described as false promise(s) (e.g., Hungary 1956; Syria during the past decade, etc.) Moreover, in some epochs mutual non-interference is a sufficiently strong norm, then states happily ignore each other's constitutional arrangements (or religion, etc.).
Even so, alongside equality, liberal democracies are also committed to the idea that the world can and ought to be made into non-zero-sum relationships. Part of the liberal faith is that such win-win outcomes are more easily attainable with other liberal democracies. Why this would be so is not obvious empirically. But the thought is that most dictatorships and franchise restricted oligarchies have political economies where one person/group always gains at the expense of others. Whether is this is true empirically may well be worth debating, but it is notable that strongmen all use rhetoric of us vs them and advance the cause of cronyism and in-group rent-seeking. Casual empiricism suggests that a strongman is especially eager to concentrate power and to prevent other sources of countervailing powers to be developed.
Obviously, it's conceptually possible to have enlightened despotism just as it is known to be possible to have democracies elect strongmen who embrace illiberal, zero-sum logic (something I already noticed before Trump was elected; recall also this post). Given the considerable history of savagery by liberal democracies toward the disenfranchised and conquered, one may well think, with justice, that thinking in terms of win-win may be the exception that proves the rule. An embarrassed silence, perhaps presented with an knowing appeal to political realism, about an expanding community of democracies may well be the appropriate stance.
Even so, given that President Trump and his administration clearly view China as a rival if not enemy, and opportunities for public embarrassment may well be relished, their lack of interest in its human rights violations (especially toward the Turkic Muslims) and lukewarm support for Hong Kong protesters reveal part of the underlying instincts. It is obvious that this Administration is willing to sacrifice human rights for possible financial gain (the last sentence of the quoted newsreport supports that).
To say that Trump's attitudes towards democratic norms and practices are conflicted is intended as an understatement. That he, thereby, undermines democratic practice abroad and at home is to be expected by now. As Jacob Levy helped me see, Trump's rhetoric is a form of political action that is intended to undermine trust in democracy, the rule of law (cf. his hectoring of Sweden this week), and even minimal ethnic/racial cohabitation.+ Jacob T. Levy's writings (see here) have also convinced me that in a certain sense Trump's attitude is an effect of the Republican party's more general tendency to understand itself (correctly) as a minority (and so to use non-democratic means to 'win' elections).* Lowering mutual trust is a sound strategy if you are a minority and want your opposition disunified.++
And in reflecting on these last few sentence, and then looking over President Trump's comments, I had one of those terrifying duck-rabbit gestalt-switches. Trump does not understand President Xi's power as illegitimate in virtue of representing the rule of force; Trump admits he has no interest in the democratic protest(er)s, rather he identifies with the prudential restraint of a minority in control of state power armed to the teeth.
+The interest in Trump's racism obscures his strategy of stoking racialized mutual animosities.
*I had an inchoate sense of this in discussing the Tea Party in 2013 (here). By the way, as party leadership elections go, Republican primaries are fairly democratic by any standard (recall this surprisingly prescient piece).
++I think I owe the idea to Ryan Muldoon.
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