The Brookings Institution is part of the traditional foreign policy establishment in the United States. And it reveals its utter blindness to the realities of the U.S.-China relationship in this article. I quote in part:
“Beijing does not seek to overthrow democratic regimes or force its political model on others (with the critical exception of Taiwan, which it claims as its territory). At home, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) runs an increasingly repressive authoritarian system and justifies its model as “fit” for China’s “national conditions.” It seeks respect and admiration for its own system, rails against outside criticism, and seeks to shape the global order to favor its interests. Yet it does not see capitalism or the existence of other democracies as antithetical to its own existence.”
As Michael McLaughlin and I document in Battlefield Cyber: How China and Russia Are Undermining Our Democracy and National Security, available here, these two authoritarian states are engaged in a global battle to undermine democracies everywhere. Their key tools include massive disinformation campaigns (and the Chinese have started using Artificial Intelligence to support this effort), advertising and fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter, United Front tactics (on the part of China) to subvert our democratic norms, massive theft of technology, and more. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin see the existence of democracies as a direct threat to their Communist party-states. The Chinese, in particular, are seeking to co-opt elites in many different countries with big infrastructure projects or other financial inducements, and are slowly undermining the United States, World Health Organization, and other institutions the Americans and their allies created. Brookings is flat out wrong: Xi Jinping, a hardline Marxist-Leninist and the more powerful of the two leaders, does see “capitalism or the existence of other democracies as antithetical to its own existence.”
