The new Brookings report on U.S.-China “strategic distrust” is interesting reading (via Drezner). The Chinese co-author, Wang Jisi, cites U.S.-led democracy promotion as one of the causes of Chinese distrust:

American involvement in the “color revolutions” in Central Asian states and some other former Soviet states, as well as the American attitude toward the Arab Spring in 2011, have further solidified the notion that the United States would sabotage the rule of the CPC if it saw similar developments and opportunities in China.

This is not an entirely far-fetched or unreasonable suspicion on their part. Let’s remember that one of Mitt Romney’s foreign policy advisers has written a book about the U.S.-Chinese “struggle for mastery in Asia” in which he made the following statement:

Stripped of diplomatic niceties, the ultimate aim of the American strategy [toward China] is to hasten a revolution, albeit a peaceful one, that will sweep away China’s one-party authoritarian state and leave a liberal democracy in its place.

According to Friedberg, this is a description of U.S. strategy, not an argument for what it ought to be. As one of the causes of U.S.-Chinese distrust, U.S.-led democracy promotion seems to be an unnecessary irritant in an important bilateral relationship. Furthermore, it doesn’t seem to serve any identifiable American interest to create additional mistrust between the U.S. and other countries, but this has been the effect of democracy promotion efforts in many other countries besides China. Robert Merry commented on this earlier this week:

For anyone trying to understand why this anger is welling up in those countries, it might be helpful to contemplate how Americans would feel if similar organizations from China or Russia or India were to pop up in Washington, with hundreds of millions of dollars given to them by those governments, bent on influencing our politics.