'Competition' with China Will Be Bad for Democracy Here and Around the World

It is simply taken for granted that there must be a “competition” with China and that it will therefore involve the kinds of awful tradeoffs that the U.S. made during the Cold War.

Matt Yglesias embraces the hypocrisy of Biden’s democracy summit and calls for even more of it:

The fight for democracy is too important to conduct on ideological grounds alone; to win, the U.S. will need an appropriate amount of realpolitik. America can say it cares about democracy — and actually take steps to protect and promote it — but the real focus should be competing with China, with all the compromises that will entail.

Both the “fight for democracy” and the “competition” with China are very poorly defined, and it isn’t clear how the U.S. would “win” either one. What does “winning” look like? Does it mean having a democratically elected Chinese government by the end of the century? Does it mean simply bottling up Chinese influence as much as possible through an anti-Chinese “coalition of the willing”? To what end? I don’t think anyone knows the answers to any of these questions.

It is simply taken for granted that there must be a “competition” with China and that it will therefore involve the kinds of awful tradeoffs that the U.S. made during the Cold War. That “competition” needs some sort of ideological significance attached to it so that it isn’t simply crude Machtpolitik, so we claim to be standing up for democracy. There is supposed to be tension between democracy promotion and “strategic competition,” but if we assume that the former is mostly window-dressing for the “real” contest there is no contradiction to be resolved. After all, the difference in our political systems is not the real reason why the U.S. and China are now moving on a collision course, and that difference did not prevent our governments from cooperating earlier when they judged it to be useful.

Major power rivalries are generally not good for the political health of smaller powers. If U.S.-China “competition” takes the zero-sum, militarized form that many expect that it will, we should expect more democratic backsliding and reversion to authoritarianism in many more countries. The major powers will want reliable clients, and they may decide that freely elected governments are often too fickle to be useful. It will probably be just a matter of time before hawks start arguing that the U.S. “needs” to overthrow this or that democratic government because it is too cozy with Beijing. Those attempts would probably take place in Africa and South America, but it might very well extend to democratic allies in Asia if they end up being too accommodating. The “fight for democracy” would probably cease to have much to do with supporting democracy fairly early on.

We should also assume that the rivalry will have similarly pernicious effects here at home. If you genuinely want to “fight for democracy,” and especially for democracy in the United States, pursuing this kind of decades-long rivalry with a major authoritarian power is one of the last things you would choose to do. A rivalry like that will not only consume enormous resources for another massive military buildup, but it will stoke militaristic and nationalistic attitudes that are typically not conducive to healthy and flourishing democratic political life. If the “real focus should be competing with China,” that will likely mean that everything else, including safeguarding democratic government at home, takes a back seat. The “competition” with China is bound to be much more costly and corrosive of our political system and values than most of its cheerleaders imagine.