Quote from an opponent to America's hegemony.
Its political comity has imploded. The Biden Administration celebrated the Oscar for the film Navalny, which mythologised the Russian ‘opposition leader’, by arresting its main political rival and Presidential candidate, Donald Trump.
https://johnmenadue.com/defeat-to-america/He'd like a defeat of America in the goal to make it accept a multipolar world.
So many of America's foes support Trump.
So do autocratic leaders.
Collateral damage is already mounting. The presidency, constitution and democratic governance risk permanent reputational harm. US global influence and moral authority may not survive sustained mockery. Enemies look on with glee. It boosts their storyline of inexorable American decline. For them, it’s the end of empire show.
Take Russia and its paranoid, delusional, Trump-like president, Vladimir Putin. His Ukraine invasion is a total bust, yet hermetically-sealed Putin may be the last person to realise, insiders say. He got more, not less Nato last week when Finland joined the alliance. His thinking, like his army, is stuck in Donbas mud.
For Xi Jinping, Trump’s return to the limelight is a gift from the geopolitical and theatrical gods
Yet Trump’s shenanigans offer Putin a lifeline. The Russian simply has to stick it out until, as he hopes, his American admirer beats the rap and he, or someone very like him, ousts Biden next year. As in 2016, Putin will do all he can to help with disinformation, cyber-attacks and dirty tricks. Meanwhile, he takes a US reporter hostage to make Biden look weak.
“Putin’s narrative of international politics has three broad themes: democratic decay in the west, the failures of western foreign policy, and the decline of the liberal international order,” analysts Erin Baggott Carter, Brett Carter and Larry Diamond noted recently. The demeaning Trump spectacle reinforces all three of these supposed trends.
Xi Jinping, China’s leader, will be keen, too, to exploit any Trump revival to advance his plans for global hegemony and an authoritarian new world order. Beijing’s propaganda feeds off US domestic dysfunction, Washington gridlock, corruption, racial tensions and gun crime – to which Trump and his Maga minions contribute hugely.
Internationally, Trump’s antics give Xi a window to derail a distracted Biden’s democracy agenda and out-manoeuvre the US. “Trump’s foreign policy was shortsighted, transactional, mercurial, untrustworthy, boorish, personalist, and profoundly illiberal,” analyst Jonathan Kirshner wrote after Biden’s victory in 2020.
As Xi might say, what’s not to like? He would heartily applaud a repeat performance. For the Chinese Communist party, Trump’s return to the limelight is a gift from the geopolitical and theatrical gods.
Xi’s not alone. Israel’s failed coup leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Saudis’ Biden-baiting crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and nuke-coveting, misogynistic Iranian mullahs are all avid Trump fans. Who knows? Perhaps North Korea’s lonesome dictator, Kim Jong-un, will start getting love letters again, sealed with a slobbery kiss.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2023/apr/09/its-the-donald-j-trump-show-and-the-worlds-tyrants-are-its-biggest-fans
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