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LONDON – For America’s adversaries, there was no greater proof of the fallibility of Western democracy than the sight of the U.S. Capitol shrouded in smoke and besieged by a mob whipped by their unwittingly outgoing president.
Already China, Iran and Russia have pointed to the uproar in Washington as proof that America’s much-vaunted system of government is fundamentally flawed and riddled with hypocrisy.
Across Europe, there is also serious concern. Not only to the division and instability shaking their powerful transatlantic ally, but also what this means for their relationship with Washington after the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden in two weeks.
Many wonder how the United States can once again lecture other countries about democratic values or how it can tell other countries that they are not stable enough internally to have nuclear weapons.
“You now see the situation in the United States,” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a live televised speech on Friday. “It’s their democracy and their human rights, it’s their election scandal, it’s their values. These values are ridiculed by the whole world. Even their friends laugh at them.”
While Iran has criticized, its government in Tehran has cracked down on its own people’s rights to freedom of speech and assembly, and its security forces have used deadly force to crush protests, killing hundreds. and by arbitrarily detaining thousands more, according to Amnesty International in London.
In China and Russia, officials have questioned why U.S. lawmakers have been so quick to back pro-democracy protesters in other parts of the world as unrest rages on their own streets.
“You may all remember the words some US officials, lawmakers and some media used about Hong Kong,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying said in a briefing on Thursday. . “What are they saying about the United States now?”
Hong Kong police on Wednesday arrested more than 50 pro-democracy figures for allegedly violating the strict new national security law. Antony Blinken, Biden’s candidate for secretary of state, said on Twitter this week that the new administration “would stand alongside the people of Hong Kong and against Beijing’s crackdown on democracy.”
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In Russia Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Lower House of Parliament, told state media that “the boomerang of ‘color revolutions’, as we can see, is coming back to the United States.” , referring to the wave of West-backed democratic uprisings in the former Soviet republics in the 2000s.
Many people pointed out that many protesters – in the former Soviet republics and in Hong Kong – were calling for more democratic rights. Under President Vladimir Putin, the rights of regular Russians have been severely eroded, observers say.
The crowd at the United States Capitol on Wednesday, however, sought to overturn a legitimate election.
This distinction has not prevented American critics from making a striking comparison.
“This is an absolute gift for authoritarian leaders whose main narrative is that democratic systems are weak and unstable,” said Matthew Harries, Berlin-based senior researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank.
“Someone like Xi Jinping can say: Listen, these people can’t get Covid-19 under control and they can’t even protect their legislature,” he said, referring to the head of China, as with the Chinese Communist Party stability and growth. “
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Echoed the sentiment Thursday, calling Trump “Putin’s complete tool” and saying that by encouraging the riot on Capitol Hill, the president gave “the greatest of all his many gifts “to the Russian President.
Victor Gao, who was an interpreter for late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, said the scenes in Washington were a living retaliation to those who wanted to transplant American political values elsewhere.
“Our system has its own problems, but this system for China has worked for China for 45 years,” he said of the one-party state. “China will never accept any attempt by the United States to impose its system on China because it does not work” for China.
Although President Donald Trump spoke warmly about Xi, he has also hit China with tariffs and sanctions for what the United States says is its restriction of Hong Kong autonomy and human rights violations. man against Uyghur Muslims, which Beijing disputes.
Perhaps the most notable recent attempt to export an American-style democracy has occurred in Iraq, with institution building one of the stated objectives of the 2003 US-led invasion. Wednesday’s events, a circulating meme showed Iraqi tanks were launching an invasion “to bring democracy back to the United States.”
“It’s been 20 years since George W. Bush tried to export American democracy as a model for the rest of the world, and these days that model is in deep crisis,” said Giovanni Orsina, director of the School. of the government of Luiss Guido. Carli University in Rome.
“After what we’ve seen, the idea that Americans can teach democracy to the rest of the world is much weaker,” he said. “And to make matters worse is the fact that there are no great alternative democracies out there – so the American crisis reflects a crisis of democracy in the world.”
The sense of a shared crisis was clear in the alarm statements of several European leaders. The United States is far from the only country battling its populist right wing, fueled by online disinformation conspiracy theories.
“The fiery words turn into violent acts – on the Reichstag steps, and now in the Capitol,” tweeted German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, referring to an attempt by anti-coronavirus lockdown protesters to storm the German Parliament in August. “The contempt for democratic institutions is devastating.”
After a few murderous years of Trump, few European leaders felt that Biden’s victory got them back to the way things were. There are initiatives led by French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, to become less militarily dependent on Washington.
And yet, this week’s events in Washington have shed light on the future of their relationship with the United States.
In Paris, François Heisbourg, Senior Advisor for Europe at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said: “The outside world has to assume that there is uncertainty, a high degree of instability, about the situation of states. -United in the coming years. . “
European powers “must accept that the fate of the United States is uncertain,” he said. “And if this is the case, we must prepare for a world in which the United States is not the partner we are used to having.”
Alexander Smith reported from London; Saphora Smith from Bristol, England; Claudio Lavanga from Rome; Nancy Ing from Paris; Andy Eckardt from Mainz, Germany; Tatyana Chistikova from Moscow; and Dawn Liu from Beijing.
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