Republican candidate Donald Trump will thus become the 47th president of the United States, closing an electoral campaign punctuated by his insults, outrage and tortuous arguments.
His personality, his messianic obsession with America's greatness, his fascination with dictators and his total disregard for his allies are all factors that could profoundly alter the world's economic and strategic landscape.
The fog surrounding his future foreign policy is all the thicker as the campaign has polarized around domestic policy issues: inflation, abortion and the migration crisis. Yet his stark divergence from his Democratic rival's positions offers crucial insights into his approach, particularly about China.
A striking contrast
Trump and his rival, Kamala Harris, presented starkly opposing visions of international relations, particularly on the critical question of Sino-American relations.
The Harris-Trump face-off masked a deeper clash between two opposing worldviews: on the one hand, the Democrat's multilateralism, rooted in interstate cooperation to establish common rules; on the other, a supremacist and isolationist foreign policy reduced to purely transactional dealings in a law-of-the-jungle approach to advancing American interests.
So, while Beijing maintained official neutrality during the campaign, Trump appeared to be China's preferred candidate by default, judging by the systematic criticism of Kamala Harris across state-controlled social media. Sure, Beijing's strategists abhor the Republican's brutal, erratic behavior, but their four-year experience with his presidency has revealed its exploitable weaknesses.
For Xi Jinping, politics and ideology trump economics. The Communist leader seeks to guide China onto global leadership by promoting a "community of common destiny for mankind," an emphatic formula for a new Sinocentric, anti-Western world order. Harris thus represented a far graver threat to this dream of a Sinocentric international system, as the Democrat - like her predecessor - championed a rules-based world order with America as the driving force for democracy and human rights.
'My favorite word'
With Donald Trump, however, the grand design of the "new Mao," consecrated president for life by the Chinese Parliament in 2018, seems much less threatened. During the campaign, the billionaire's focus on China centered primarily on trade warfare, which he vowed to wage even more ruthlessly than during his first term, having seen the limited impact of his previous tariffs on reducing the US deficit.
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