Trump has been good for Beijing. Domestic American political paralysis, the dilution of American moral authority, Trump’s rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord — all this has favored China, now the world leader in renewable energy. Its advance is steady and relentless. In Europe, from Greece to Serbia, China is pursuing its Africa model: buy up whatever it can to control resources and infrastructure.

Trump has picked a fight over trade, and he has some legitimate grievances, but his failure to develop a coherent geostrategic policy to confront China makes the tariff fight look like his usual petulance. The president’s strange embrace of Kim Jong-un in North Korea also reinforces China’s position. The president shows weakness and makes concessions, while getting nothing tangible in return. Even a withdrawal of American troops from the Korean Peninsula is not unimaginable. That would be very much to China’s liking, as well as an act of dangerous folly.

Chinese expansionism under Xi and North Korea’s unpredictability imbue East Asia with some of the tensions of Europe during the Cold War. The clash between the United States and China over “unfair trade practices” at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit was so severe that no communiqué was issued, a first since the meetings began a quarter-century ago. Still, I believe that China’s quest for regional and global stability to complete its rise by 2050 will contain its confrontation with the United States short of any military clash.

Such limits on war are likely reinforced by technology, despite the uses that authoritarian societies like China and Russian have made of it. We are not in the world of the first half of the 20th century.

Trump and other nationalists use many of the methods of fascism — scapegoating, xenophobia, nationalist mythologizing, mob mobilization — but the forces favoring open societies are far stronger than they were a century ago. Walls are going up everywhere, and China has demonstrated that the internet can be controlled, but the spread of ideas and idealism is not easily held in check. Even a really terrible American president such as the incumbent cannot easily send the world over a cliff. This is where the hope of the 21st-century lies — not in nations, Trump’s obsession, but in people and networks.

The vitality of the American press demonstrates some of the limits on Trump’s power. His attacks on American institutions, including the Justice Department, and on the nation’s best media outlets has spurred a growing awareness of the need for tough investigative journalism — and that’s not free. Online subscriptions to newspapers, including The New York Times, have soared. That is the good news.

The bad news is that Trump’s phrase “fake news” has taken hold. You hear it all over the world. Journalists are attacked with greater impunity — that word again — because Trump has declared open season on them and their profession. The vile murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul is just the most egregious example of this.