News Analysis The United States, Europe, Japan, and other powerful economies should align more closely to protect democracy against China’s unscrupulous trade policies. But as illustrated by the airline industry, Beijing skillfully uses its gatekeeper status to the massive China market to play the democracies against each other. Since at least 2019, for example, Beijing has effectively used aircraft preferences to split the United States from Europe by manipulating purchases to benefit European manufacturers at the expense of American companies like Boeing. This scares countries like Germany and France into silently accepting Beijing’s illiberality, including its now widely-recognized goal of global hegemony. When two of Boeing’s 737 MAX planes crashed in 2019, Beijing took the opportunity to be the first to ground the jet, and was the last major airline market to only partially approve MAX flights. Over 185 of 195 regulators globally cleared the MAX to fly after November …