Making friends

It's not Godwin's Law, but it's close. As considerations of Trump's art of the deal multiply, the likelihood of a wry reference to How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) tends to one. Dale Carnegie's self-help classic prescribes that, to increase influence, it's worth presenting a sympathetic image of oneself. And Trump, who, in line with Machiavelli, believes that, in a regime change, it's better to be feared than loved, is the anti-Carnegie. His disruptive diplomatic dramaturgies, where foreign leaders can only act as buffoons, flatterers, or cowardly accomplices, deliberately exclude the staging of friendship in order to crudely exhibit the president's capacity for tyrannical subjugation.

You don't have to be a big theater buff to realize that a different kind of play has been playing out these past few days. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit and the commemoration of the victory over Japan and the end of World War II have served precisely to allow China, in addition to showing off its military might, to once again showcase the unstoppable expansion of its circle of friends.

As Xi Jinping is keen to remind us, citing Confucius at every opportunity, this expansion has been the main objective of Chinese diplomacy for years.

Although Xi does not quote Plutarch, he is a master in the art of taking advantage of enemies.

It's a clever move. First, because, since friendship is a mutual relationship based on recognizing the other as an equal, which requires sharing certain values ​​and is maintained by practicing certain virtues, it allows him to present his foreign policy as not based exclusively on interests, but also on principles that possess all the power of vagueness.

Secondly, because it allows these principles to be detached from an ideology, the communist one, which is now without demand, and to root them in a postcolonial discourse in which the friendly relationship, which would foster win-win collaborations, is easily opposed to the supremacism and exploitation that have often distanced the reality of the West from its ideals.

And finally, because it allows us to connect these same principles with an ancient culture that has been predisposed to friendship since the Confucian Analects , an aspect more relevant than it seems because, as Americans knew before forgetting it, the soft power that public diplomacy promotes is nourished by the values ​​that are supposedly expressed in the culture of the power that seeks to accumulate it.

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Although Xi never quotes Plutarch, he is a master of the art of exploiting enemies, as Plutarch taught in a famous treatise. At a time when Trump's anti-Carnegianism accelerates the transition toward a new international disorder, the expansion of China's circle of friends is oriented toward a policy of balance of power, the oldest of anti-hegemonic strategies.