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
-
Trump and the War in Ukraine with Michael Kofman and Robert Lee
More than 1000 days into the War in Ukraine, questions about continued support for the Ukrainian effort and the prospect of a negotiated settlement in the months to come have ...
By Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Jim Townsend, Rob Lee & Mike Kofman
-
RUSI Recording: The Impact of the U.S. Presidential Election on European Security
Jim Townsend, an adjunct senior fellow in the CNAS Transatlantic Security Program, joins RUSI to discuss the impact the next US presidential administration will have on NATO, ...
By Jim Townsend
-
Sharper: Trump 2.0
Donald Trump's return to the White House is widely expected to reshape America's global priorities. With personnel choices and policy agendas that mark a significant break fro...
By Charles Horn & Gwendolyn Nowaczyk
-
More Escalation in Ukraine: British Missiles and U.S. Land Mines
Jim Townsend, adjunct senior fellow in the Center for a New American Security Transatlantic Security Program, joins to discuss British long-range missiles and U.S. land mines ...
By Jim Townsend