The unsettling messages we send when we are unsettled

We now know that in the wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley called his Chinese counterpart General Li Zuocheng.

The U.S. had been picking up intelligence that the Chinese were shaken by those events and at least some in China believed that an unstable president might launch an attack against their country. Milley did his best to reassure the Chinese that while democracy was, in his words, "messy" that America's institutions were holding firm. He was not sure if General Li completely believed him.

There are a couple of lessons to draw from this.

First, the United States is not some overgrown Las Vegas. What happens here, does not stay here. It reverberates around the world at the speed of light and intelligence services and political leaders in countries that are both friendly and unfriendly will make judgments as to what it all means. It is a situation that can be ripe for miscalculation.

Second, they do this through the prisms of their own experiences and their own values. In the case of the Chinese, who prize "order" above just about all else, the disorder and the apparent attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power was frightening. Through their authoritarian lens, they would have seen it much differently than, say, our allies in Europe, though they, too, were most certainly unsettled.

The events of Jan. 6 also provoked a neuralgic reaction from our top military leaders, and Milley felt compelled to establish some safeguards to prevent the president from launching some sort of wag-the-dog military action as a justification for holding onto power. Of course, there was also the danger that our adversaries would take advantage of a distracted America to advance their own agendas.

There is ample evidence that a series of events - the financial meltdown in 2008, the U.S. decision to withdraw from Middle Eastern and South Asian battlefields, the poor handling of the COVID pandemic in the first six months, the opioid crisis, and the increasingly toxic political divisions that keep America from addressing a host of challenges - have emboldened the Chinese, who have concluded that the United States is a nation in decline. As a result, we today see a much more aggressive China trying to push outward in a variety of ways that will make it stronger and place America in a weaker position.

The recent submarine deal with Australia and Britain was one step in pushing back, as is the strengthening of the "Quad" - the alliance among the U.S., India, Japan, and Australia. Unfortunately, President Trump's decision to pull the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership removed a potentially important economic lever, though - to be fair - numerous Democrats, listening to the voices of organized labor, might not have seen the pact through to the end, either.

In the past several days, we faced a possible government shutdown and, theoretically, still face a self-inflicted fiscal crisis over the debt ceiling. When Minority Leader McConnell says Republicans will not lift a finger to prevent default by raising or suspending the debt ceiling, it sends a signal to our friends and foes that the United States has become ungovernable. We send our representatives to Washington to govern, not to play dangerous games for specious political advantage.

They need to remember that the whole world is watching, and our friends and foes will draw their own conclusions and act accordingly.

• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86.