Denis Staunton: Donald Trump sounds more like a Chinese leader as he rejects the liberal world order

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

61% : China's view, shared across much of the world and echoed by Trump in Riyadh last week, is that states should govern themselves more or less as they choose and other countries should mind their own business.
60% : China's view, echoed by Trump, is that states should govern themselves as they choose and other countries should mind their own business.
59% : The EU is open to discussing such reforms, and it welcomes China's regular expressions of loyalty to the UN Charter.
56% : In a world that is becoming more multipolar and less multilateral, the EU and China share an interest in defending multilateral co-operation and the United Nations system.
56% : But to be a more effective human rights champion, the EU must look more closely at its own record and rebalance its approach to take more account of economic, social and cultural rights.
55% : Beijing says it is committed to keeping the existing multilateral institutions centred on the UN but it wants to make them more representative and democratic.
55% : The EU, like the rest of the West, has always placed greater emphasis on civil and political rights than economic, social and cultural rights.
54% : But while the EU champions the "rules-based international order", China advocates what it calls "true multilateralism".
52% : When the EU published its human rights priorities for 2025, only one of its 48 sections dealt with economic, social and cultural rights.
52% : Instead of clinging to the idea of a contest between democracies and autocracies, the EU should focus on strengthening the UN institutions, working with China as well as middle powers such as Brazil and South Africa to restore authority to the multilateral system.
51% : It is the third principle, of noninterference in each other's internal affairs, that creates the sharpest tension between China and the EU, particularly in the area of human rights.
50% : This leaves the EU with a problem Donald Trump's speech in Riyadh last week was noteworthy in a number of ways, including the fact that it ended with YMCA, the 1970s gay anthem he has adopted as a campaign song, blasting out to his Saudi audience.
40% : Without the US, what Kallas calls the free world is a greatly shrunken and less powerful coalition and the rest of the world does not recognise the EU as a moral leader.
36% : Rather than protecting their human rights, the EU treats them as criminals, incarcerating thousands in detention centres along its borders and across the Mediterranean.
15% : While Trump was trashing liberal interventionism in Riyadh, the EU delegation in Beijing was hosting a conference to mark the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and the EU.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.