Americans and Britons alike have viewed political upheavals, government collapses, and self-destructive mistakes like the eruption of unstable countries and immature political systems with smugness.
No more. And China and Russia couldn’t be happier.
The humiliating resignation of British Prime Minister Liz Truss after just 45 days in power on Thursday was just the latest government fiasco to shake the two great democracies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Britain has gone from crisis to crisis in recent years in a way that has left allies who once viewed the country as an example of good governance baffled by its self-immolation. This came as the United States, the global anchor of democracy and capitalism, went through its own paroxysms, including an insurrection and intensified attacks on its free elections.
Both nations, who saved the world for democracy in World War II, were left to reel by rebel leaders, who often disdained truth and facts and built power bases by stoking resentment over the detritus of inequality spawned by globalization. These leaders scoffed at experts, declared blood feuds with government institutions and civil servants, and conjured up an often-mythical vision of past glories with a vow to make their nations great again.
In the United States, Donald Trump’s political rise has left his country internally distant, turned the world’s most vital democracy against its allies, and left the democratic decay in which Joe Biden’s presidency can only be an interregnum. In Britain, the Brexit vote to leave the European Union led by Boris Johnson has left the country untethered and poorer than before, ushering in an era of political madness poised to produce a fourth prime minister in about three years.
Despite their poisoned legacies and chaotic, lie-ridden administrations, both Trump and Johnson are considering a comeback, showing that this savage period of rule-breaking and personality-driven populism is far from over and that most conventional leaders are still failing to deliver. satisfy voters and restore faith in effective government.
The chaos in London and Washington has dangerous consequences. The health of Great Britain and the United States is fundamental to the entire Western way of life.
The self-destruction of Western democracy is coming at a time when it is under intense challenge from powerful enemies. Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 US elections in an effort to devalue the prestige of the Western political model. While its own leadership has been disastrously exposed by the war in Ukraine, Russia can only benefit from the attacks on the US electoral system and government inconsistency in the UK that are undermining the brand of democracy across the world.
The crisis of confidence for the two great English-speaking democracies is also coming as an increasingly powerful and aggressive China seeks to challenge the Western-led global order established after World War II. With President Xi Jinping expected to secure a third term unprecedented in modern times in the coming days, Beijing is increasingly touting its brand of relentless one-party capitalism as an alternative model to the West’s democratic, open market economy.
Biden warned on Thursday that allies were watching what was happening to the US political system, citing the January 6, 2021 insurgency and a Republican response that played down Trump’s role in inciting the riot.
“These guys on the other team don’t understand. They don’t understand that how America is going to determine how the rest of the world is going to do,” Biden said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia, according to the White House press group.
“They look to us as a leader. They look up to us… because they’re not that big or powerful.”
Here is the most extraordinary feature of Truss’ tenure at 10 Downing Street: she decided that a kingdom at risk of falling apart, facing a winter inflation and energy crisis caused by a European war and a once-in-a-century pandemic, and who had just lost the only monarch most of his people knew, didn’t need a period of stability.
His sudden new budget, with massive tax cuts for the rich with no plans to pay them, alarmed markets, sent the pound crashing, nearly destroyed the pension industry and left homeowners facing huge increases in mortgage payments.
The move, possibly Britain’s most disastrous political gamble since the Suez crisis of the 1950s, destroyed London’s reputation for sound financial management and reasonable governance and received a rebuke from the International Monetary Fund. It cemented the bewildering new image of Britain as a nation caught in a repeating cycle of self-harm.
Truss was forced to withdraw from the scheme and finally resigned after several days in government but not in power. Conservative members of parliament – afraid to call the general election the country needs because they would be eliminated – must now select two more prime minister candidates to present to members of the party, a small bloc of Britons who are far to the right of the majority. of your countrymen. It’s a ridiculous spectacle that has now been exposed as a profoundly undemocratic way of choosing a prime minister who can change the nation’s direction by a penny – or a 10 pence coin.
In a way, the struggles of Conservative Party prime ministers to govern reflect some political dynamics in the United States. Just as the GOP is held hostage by a radical right-wing base that has fractured its reputation as a sensible government, conservative leaders tend to appease their own right-wing radicals — and their visceral hostility to the European Union in particular.
At the same time, Brits used to see Italy – with its notoriously unstable politics, economic crises and revolving door for prime ministers – as a joke. But now his country’s ungovernable, faction-based politics are derided. There is also great concern among the allies troubled by a few erratic years in which the London government often lashed out at its partners.
French President Emmanuel Macron, weeks after Truss misunderstood whether he was Britain’s friend or foe, said he had a wish for political bloodshed in the English Channel.
“Personally, I am always sad to see a colleague leave, but what I want is to see that stability return as soon as possible,” Macron told reporters on Thursday.
Ireland also expressed concern about how the disruption could affect its prospects after a period when Truss threatened to spark a trade war with Europe by breaking a post-Brexit deal on Northern Ireland that the Conservative government had negotiated under Johnson.
“What’s important as Britain’s closest neighbor – we have significant economic relationships and many other relationships with the UK – I think stability is very important,” Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin said.
It used to be said that Truss was facing the toughest legacy of any British prime minister since Winston Churchill. Her successor, who is due to be installed next week, will be even worse off thanks to the chaos she has unleashed in what must be the shortest term of any prime minister in British history.
The question now is whether this new leader will be able to stabilize the country amid a likely bleak winter of rising heating costs, raging inflation and escalating industrial strikes. Or whether he or she will subject a tottering country to even more political confusion caused by fanaticism and fratricide that destroy the Conservative Party, whose long periods of power have made it the most successful political party in the world.
Biden’s response to Truss’ resignation was a fitting brief statement, as he only officially met with the outgoing prime minister once, showed little regard for his style of government and hostility towards his ancestral home, Ireland, and is now gearing up for the third British leader. of his presidency.
“The United States and the United Kingdom are strong allies and enduring friends – and that fact will never change,” Biden said in a written statement.
While Trump urged Brexit and reveled in London’s dispute with the EU under the Conservatives, the White Houses of Biden and Obama saw the political madness that gripped the UK – and the resulting waning of the relationship partner’s global diplomatic weight. United States – with some dismay. . Obama caused a huge stir when he warned during a visit to London that the UK would go to “the end of the line” for a trade deal with the US if it left the EU. His comment may have infuriated pro-Brexit leaders, but it turned out to be accurate.
On the question of who the US calls when it wants to talk to Europe (a possibly apocryphal comment often attributed to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger), the answer is that 10 Downing Street is no longer at the top of the White House’s speed dial. While the US and UK could hardly be closer on military and intelligence matters, Washington – at least when Trump was out of the Oval Office – has long looked to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel as its most important European leader. Now that she has retired, Macron is the main point of contact. Biden sent an unmistakable signal of the newly re-elected French leader’s growing global role with an invitation to his first state dinner in December.
Both leaders publicly warned of the threat to global and western democracies. Macron won a challenge from far-right leader Marine Le Pen by winning re-election this year, but his party’s influence is only growing. Macron told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview last month: “I think we have a big crisis of democracies, of what I would call liberal democracies.” Asked if he was concerned about democracy in the United States, he said: “I care about all of us.”
When Biden took office after Trump’s unprecedented attempt to halt a peaceful transfer of power on Capitol Hill, which still bore the scars of its mob looting of the former president, he put the salvation of global democracy at the center of his tenure.
He returned to the topic last month outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the American experiment was born. He tacitly admitted that while he was warning the world of the danger that democracy faces abroad, he could not guarantee its survival at home.
But he told Americans, “It’s in our power, it’s in our hands – yours and mine – to stop the attack on American democracy.”
He added: “I believe that America is at an inflection point – one of those moments that determines the shape of everything that is to come.”
However, this midterm election only highlighted the danger ahead. Dozens of 2020 election deniers are running as Republican candidates. The former president’s falsehoods have convinced millions that the country’s elections are corrupt. The “Make America Great Again” movement is more tied to the cult of its leader’s authoritarian personality than ever before, as Trump considers a race for a new presidential term that would likely destroy the foundation of democratic governance more than the first.
While it can be perversely argued that British democracy worked to quickly dispatch a failed leader in Truss, Trump has been impeached twice, is facing multiple legal challenges, and is still a viable political figure with a real chance of returning to power. That’s why when Biden tells foreign leaders that “America is back,” many of them clearly wonder how long.
As leaders come and go, the enduring strength of political systems in the US and UK has been their stability, orderly transfers of power, and their ability to foster conditions in which capitalism can thrive and people can move up the income ladder.
On both sides of the Atlantic, this foundation is now in doubt.
