LONDON – For America’s opponents, there was no greater proof of the fallibility of Western democracy than the face of the American Capitol shrouded in smoke and besieged by a mob instigated by their reluctantly-retiring president.
Already China, Iran and Russia have pointed to the uproar in Washington as proof that the much-vaunted US system of government is fundamentally flawed and riddled with hypocrisy.
There is also serious concern throughout Europe. Not only about the divisions and instability that shakes their powerful trans-Atlantic ally, but also about what it means for their relationship with Washington after President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated in two weeks.
Many ask how the US can ever teach other countries about democratic values again, or how they can tell other countries that they are not internally stable enough to have nuclear weapons.
“You now see the situation in the United States,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, chief executive, said in a live television speech on Friday. “It’s their democracy and human rights, it’s their election scandal, it’s their values. The values are ridiculed all over the world. Even their friends laugh at them.”
While Iran has been critical, its government in Tehran has violated their own people’s rights of freedom of expression and assembly, and its security forces have used deadly force to destroy protests, killing hundreds of people and detaining thousands more arbitrarily, according to Amnesty International London.
In China and Russia, officials have asked why US lawmakers so quickly supported pro-democracy protesters in other parts of the world while unrest raged in their own streets.
“You may all remember the words that some US officials, lawmakers and some media used about Hong Kong at the time,” China spokesman Hua Chunying said. “What do they say about the United States now?”
Police in Hong Kong on Wednesday arrested more than 50 pro-democracy figures for allegedly violating the strict new national security law. Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominated candidate for foreign minister, said on Twitter this week that the new government would ‘stand with the people of Hong Kong and oppose Beijing’s repression of democracy’.
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In Russia, Leonid Slutsky, chair of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, told state media that “the boomerang of the ‘color revolutions’, as we can see, is returning to the United States,” referring to the wave of democratic uprisings endorsed by Westerners in the former Soviet republics in the 2000s.
Many people pointed out that many of the protesters – in the former Soviet republics and Hong Kong – were calling for more democratic rights. According to President Vladimir Putin, the rights of regular Russians are, according to the monitors, severely defended.
However, the mob at the US Capitol on Wednesday tried to prevent a legitimate election.
The distinction did not deter America’s opponents from making a lively comparison.
“This is an absolute gift for authoritarian leaders with the main narrative that democratic systems are weak and unstable,” said Matthew Harries, a senior research fellow from Berlin at the Royal United Services Institute, brainstorming.
“Someone like Xi Jinping can say, ‘Look, these people can not get a grip on Covid-19 and they can not even protect their legislators,'” he said, referring to China’s leader while talking to the Chinese Communist Party. Some ‘you get stability and growth. ‘
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, reiterated sentiment Thursday, calling Trump “a complete tool for Putin” and saying the president had “given the greatest of all his many gifts” to the Russian president through the riots. To encourage Capitol.
Victor Gao, who was an interpreter for China’s late leader Deng Xiaoping, said the scenes in Washington are a vivid source for those who want to transplant American political values elsewhere.
“Our system has its own problems, but this system for China has been working for China for the last 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 candidly about Xi, he also hit China with tariffs and sanctions for what the US says restricting Hong Kong’s autonomy and human rights violations against the Uighur Muslims, both of which dispute Beijing.
Perhaps the most recent attempt to carry out an American-style democracy was in Iraq, with institution building one of the stated goals of the US-led invasion in 2003. to bring democracy back to the United States. ‘
“It is 20 years ago that George W. Bush tried to carry out American democracy as a model for the rest of the world, and these days this model is in a deep crisis,” said Giovanni Orsina, director of the Government School at Luiss Guido , said. Carli University in Rome.
“From what we have 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 major alternative democracies. The American crisis therefore reflects a crisis of democracy in the world.”
The feeling of a shared crisis was evident in the concerns of several European leaders. The US is far from being the only country struggling with its populist right, fueled by conspiracy theories that do not contain information.
“Inflammatory words turn into acts of violence – on the steps of the Reichstag, and now in the Capitol,” tweeted German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, referring to an attempt by coronavirus protesters around the German parliament to storm. “The contempt for democratic institutions is devastating.”
After a few years of Trump being bruised, few European leaders have ridiculed themselves that Biden’s victory means they can go back as it was. There are moves led by French President Emmanuel Macron to support Washington less militarily, for example.
And yet, this week’s events in Washington have brought the future of their relationship with the US into sharp focus.
In Paris, François Heisbourg, a senior adviser to Europe at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said: ‘The outside world must assume that there is uncertainty, a high degree of instability about where the US will be in the next few year will be. . “
European powers “must assume that the fate of the US is uncertain,” he said. “And if that’s the case, we need to prepare for a world in which the US is not the partner we used to be.”
Alexander Smith from London reported; Saphora Smith of Bristol, England; Claudio Lavanga of Rome; Nancy Ing of Paris; Andy Eckardt of Mainz, Germany; Tatyana Chistikova of Moscow; and Dawn Liu of Beijing.