October 02, 2018
How Russia and China Undermine Democracy
Russian and Chinese actions are converging to challenge the U.S.-led global order. Last month, China joined Russia in conducting the latter’s largest military exercises since the Cold War. As the war games kicked off, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping shared pancakes and vodka in Vladivostok in yet another public display of their rapport. In addition to enhanced military cooperation, the two nations’ collaboration in international institutions and remarkably frequent high-level engagements reflect their growing agreement about how the world should be ordered. Central in this shared view is the belief that weakening democracy can accelerate the decline of Western influence and advance both Russia’s and China’s geopolitical goals.
Russia and China view efforts to support democracy—especially U.S. efforts—as thinly veiled attempts to expand U.S. influence and undermine their regimes and have consistently sought to counter Western democracy promotion. These efforts are not new, but they are changing in scope and intensity. Since 2014, Russia in particular has been taking the fight to Western democracies. Because Moscow and Beijing gauge their power in relation to the United States, they view weakening Western democracy as a means of enhancing their own standing. The Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, for example, was intended, at least in part, to tarnish U.S. democracy and allow Moscow to claim that Washington has no right telling other nations how to conduct their elections. For their part, Chinese leaders have sought to gradually weaken democratic norms as a way to enhance the international legitimacy of China’s Leninist-capitalist brand of governance.
Read the full article in Foreign Affairs.
More from CNAS
-
Luke Coffey on Brexit and the Future of the Special Relationship
Podcast
Luke Coffey, Director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation, sits down with Jim Townsend to talk about the future of UK defense...
By Jim Townsend & Luke Coffey
-
Trump Gets NATO Backwards
Commentary
Returning from the World War I armistice commemoration in Paris, President Trump reemphasized his view of America’s European allies. “We pay for large portions of other countr...
By Richard Fontaine
-
LtGen Jan Broeks and LtGen Esa Pulkkinen on EU/NATO Cooperation
Podcast
LtGen Jan Broeks, DG of the NATO International Military Staff, and LtGen Esa Pulkkinen, DG of the EU Military Staff, sat down with Dr. Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Jim Townsend t...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Jim Townsend, Jan Broeks & Esa Pulkkinen
-
The United States' Greatest Strength Over Russia and China is Its Alliance with Europe
Commentary
President Donald Trump has rightly recognized that America must do more to stand up to Chinese and Russian threats to U.S. interests. While most agree that having a national s...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor & Julianne Smith
