Xi Jinping is heading to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Perhaps his trip tells us only that the Chinese president has succumbed to the vanity that compels global elites to parade their wisdom over champagne and canapés in a small Swiss ski resort. And yet Mr Xi’s top billing at next month’s gathering also says something about the world. President-elect Donald Trump wants the US to shrug off its global responsibilities. China may grab the opening to move centre stage.
The populism that has unnerved the west during 2016 has scarcely been a match for the revolutionary tumult that gripped Europe in 1848. Though it ended in bitter disappointment for the revolutionaries, that year’s “spring of nations” struck at the foundations of the ancien regime. Today’s insurgents have grabbed power through the ballot box.
That said, a post-cold war generation lulled into believing that order and predictability are part of the state of nature has been badly shaken. Power is no longer where we thought it was. Even before the dust settles on the spreading populism that gave Mr Trump his victory and Britain, well, Brexit, we can see a different landscape taking shape.
The US president-elect still has everyone guessing. Each tilt towards a more temperate stance on domestic or international affairs is matched by angry late night tweets from the top of Trump Tower. No one ever accused Mr Trump of campaigning in poetry. As time passes, it seems even less likely that he intends to govern in prose.
Amid the swerves and the Twitter fusillades there are one or two constants. Billionaires will pay less tax and foreign policy will be unashamedly nationalist. Mr Trump belongs to a club of Americans that sees global rules and fixed alliances as a subtraction from, rather than an addition to, US power. Multilateralism is for wimps. Geopolitics is no different from business. Mr Trump wants to make deals.
He is right, of course, to think that the US can more than stand its ground in a world in which might replaces rules as the currency of international relations. The US is still the sole superpower – the reference point for everyone else’s foreign policy. On the other hand, discarding allies and making deals with the likes of Russian president Vladimir Putin is unlikely to advance US strategic interests.
Here lies the opportunity for Mr Xi in Davos. China’s distrust of the post-cold war order long predates Mr Trump. But it is a US president who is now bringing down the curtain on the Pax Americana. Set against Mr Trump’s embrace of “America First” trade and security policies, Beijing’s call for a “new model of international relations” no longer looks like an attempt to overturn the western liberal order.
To the contrary, China can cast itself as a guardian of global governance and the torchbearer for the open trading system. Mr Xi champions the Paris climate change accord, defends the international community’s nuclear deal with Iran and expands trade liberalisation in Asia and, hey presto, the bad guy is suddenly the good guy. As for China’s military manoeuvres in the South China Sea, it is the president-elect who now threatens to upend a decades-long Sino-US understanding that has kept the peace in the Taiwan Strait.
The first step to understanding the unravelling of the global order is that the new geopolitical landscape will not be drawn in straight lines. There is a tidiness about multilateralism that disappears when shared rules are replaced by the interplay of competing powers. Perhaps Mr Trump imagines a great power condominium of the US, China and Russia. The snag is their interests collide more often than coincide. Striking a bargain with Mr Putin about Syria would see the US handing a victory to Iran.