The world's leading democracy, the United States, is looking increasingly like the world's biggest and oldest surviving autocracy, China. By pursuing aggressively unilateral policies that flout the broad global consensus, President Donald Trump effectively justifies his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping's longtime defiance of international law, exacerbating already serious risks to the rules-based world order.

China is aggressively pursuing its territorial claims in the South China Sea — including by militarizing disputed areas and pushing its borders far out into international waters — despite an international arbitral ruling invalidating them. Moreover, the country has weaponized transborder river flows and used trade as an instrument of geo-economic coercion against countries that refuse to toe its line.

The U.S. has often condemned these actions. But, under Trump, those condemnations have lost credibility, and not just because they are interspersed with praise for Xi, whom Trump has called "terrific" and "a great gentleman." In fact, Trump's behavior has heightened the sense of U.S. hypocrisy, emboldening China further in its territorial and maritime revisionism in the Indo-Pacific region.