LONDON – For America’s opponents, there was no greater proof of the fallibility of Western democracy than the sight of the United States Capitol shrouded in smoke and surrounded by a crowd flogged by its president involuntarily on his way out.
China, Iran and Russia have already pointed to the turmoil in Washington as proof that the much vaunted system of government in the United States is fundamentally flawed and riddled with hypocrisy.
Across Europe, there is also great concern. Not only with division and instability shaking his powerful transatlantic ally, but also with what that means for his relationship with Washington after President-elect Joe Biden took office in two weeks.
Many question how the United States can teach other countries about democratic values or how it can tell other countries that they are not internally stable enough to have nuclear weapons.
“Now you are seeing the situation in the United States,” said supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a speech broadcast live on Friday. “This is their democracy and human rights, this is their electoral scandal, these are their values. These values are being ridiculed around the world. Even their friends laugh at them.”
While Iran criticized, its government in Tehran restricted the rights of its own people to freedom of speech and assembly, and its security forces used lethal force to crush protests, killing hundreds of people and arbitrarily detaining thousands more, according to Amnesty International in London.
In China and Russia, officials asked why US lawmakers have been so quick to support pro-democracy protesters in other parts of the world, while unrest rages in their own streets.
“You should all remember the words that some American officials, legislators and some media used about Hong Kong at the time,” said China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying at a news conference on Thursday market. “What do they say about the United States now?”
Hong Kong police arrested more than 50 pro-democracy figures on Wednesday for allegedly violating the new national security law. Antony Blinken, appointed Biden to be Secretary of State, said on Twitter this week that the new government “would support 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 ‘colored revolutions’, as we can see, is returning to the United States”, referring to the wave of uprisings endorsed by the West in the former Soviet republics in the 2000s.
Many people pointed out that many of the protesters – in the former Soviet republics and in Hong Kong – defended more democratic rights. Under President Vladimir Putin, the rights of ordinary Russians have been severely eroded, according to monitors.
The US Capitol crowd on Wednesday, however, was trying to overturn a legitimate election.
The distinction did not prevent America’s detractors from making a vivid comparison.
“This is an absolute gift for authoritarian leaders whose main narrative is that democratic systems are weak and unstable,” said Matthew Harries, senior researcher based in Berlin at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank.
“Someone like Xi Jinping can say, look, these people can’t control Covid-19 and they can’t even protect their legislature,” he said, referring to the leader of China, while with the Chinese Communist Party “you get stability and growth. “
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Echoed that sentiment on Thursday, calling Trump “a complete Putin tool” and saying that by encouraging the Capitol rebellion, the president gave “the greatest of all his many gifts “to the Russian president.
Victor Gao, who was the interpreter of the late Chinese supreme leader, Deng Xiaoping, said the scenes in Washington were a vivid response to those who wish to transplant American political values elsewhere.
“Our system has its own problems, but this system for China has worked for China for the past 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 also hit China with tariffs and sanctions for what the U.S. says is its restriction on Hong Kong’s autonomy and its human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims, both contested by Beijing.
Perhaps the most notable recent attempt to export an American-style democracy was in Iraq, with institutional strengthening being one of the stated goals of the US-led invasion in 2003. After Wednesday’s events, a circulating meme showed tanks of Iraq launching an invasion “to bring democracy back to the United States.”
“It has been 20 years since George W. Bush tried to export American democracy as a model to the rest of the world, and today that model is in deep crisis,” said Giovanni Orsina, director of the School of Government at Luiss Guido Carli University in Pomegranate.
“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, it is the fact that there are no major alternative democracies – so America’s crisis reflects a crisis of democracy in the world.”
The feeling of a shared crisis was made clear in the alarm statements by several European leaders. The United States is far from the only country fighting its populist right, fueled by online misinformation conspiracy theories.
“Inflammatory words turn into violent acts – on the steps of the Reichstag and now on the Capitol,” tweeted German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, referring to an attempt by anti-virus blockers to invade the German parliament in August. “Disdain for democratic institutions is devastating.”
After a few painful years for Trump, few European leaders have enjoyed thinking that Biden’s victory means that they can go back to how 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 brought the future of your relationship with the United States into focus.
In Paris, François Heisbourg, senior adviser for 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 United States will be in the years to come.”
European powers “have to assume that the US’s fate is uncertain,” he said. “And if that is the case, we have to prepare for a world in which the United States is not the partner we used to have.”
Alexander Smith reported from London; Saphora Smith of Bristol, England; Claudio Lavanga from Rome; Nancy Ing from Paris; Andy Eckardt from Mainz, Germany; Tatyana Chistikova from Moscow; and Dawn Liu from Beijing.