While Trump was busy hearkening back to segregationist-era maxims and militarising against the eruption of protests in the wake of George Floyd’s callous death, his foreign adversaries adopted a different tact. From Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei tweeted that “A human… has no reassurance to live in society, if…a police officer can beat him to death because of his coloured skin,” before Tehran hosted a vigil in honor of George Floyd. From Turkey, President Erdogan extended his condolences to Floyd’s family, and decried the “racist and fascist approach…of the unjust order we stand against across the world”. In the United Nations Security Council, U.S. reproaches against China’s controversial Hong Kong security law were met with recriminations against the United States’ “excessive use of force against protesters in Minneapolis” and “racial discrimination.” In a distinctly ironic and deeply tragic parallelism, despotic regimes are instrumentalising George Floyd’s death to hold a mirror to a Janus-faced America – an America whose avowed principles of justice and liberty have fallen afoul of their victims both abroad and at home.
Just as the incidences of racialized police brutality and heavy-handed protest suppression are not the first examples of the United States’ moral hypocrisy, this is not the first time U.S antagonists have taken aim at such turpitude. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s tactic of ‘Whataboutism’ entailed deflecting criticisms of their “massacres, gulags, and forced deportations” with remonstrations towards America’s legacy of slavery and institutionalised racial injustice. At the very time President Lyndon B. Johnson put boots on Vietnamese soil to preserve democracy abroad, the world watched aghast as American state troopers attacked civil rights protesters pursuing their most fundamental democratic rights on “Bloody Sunday.” And in a 2001 speech at the World Conference against racism in South Africa, Fidel Castro laid bare the crude sanctimony of a Declaration of Independence which “proclaimed that all men were born free and equal,” while more than two centuries on “the longest and most severe legal sentences are passed against African-Americans.” Nevertheless, no matter how earnest the umbrage felt towards the U.S., or how true the condemnations of its hypocrisy, its undisputed global claim to military and economic hegemony – as well as its station at the heart of multilateral institution-building – had preserved its status as chief international moral arbiter. As Gorbachev presided over the allegorical demise of the Marxist-Leninist developmental model, fervent opponents of the American democratic-capitalist paradigm lost access to a manifest alternative.
Changing of the Guard
However, this condition of United States focality has changed. As the world fixes its gaze on the conflagration of protests seizing the nation, the United States can no longer play the Pontius Pilate domestically while pontificating abroad. Economic hegemony may have, in the past, proven the United States’ alibi after abortive attempts to export “Western values” to Vietnam and Iraq. However China’s exponential rise to economic prominence has, for many states, made them a more alluring lender. The conditionality inherent to United States-backed loans – from austerity measures and laissez-faire liberalisation, to democratisation and progressive social reform – appears increasingly untenable in the face of China’s comparatively unbridled lending. For cash-strapped despots and fledgling-democratic leaders, the promise of the CCP’s lower interest rates and higher payouts often outweighs the amorphous risk of overleveraged government debt and asset capture. This is especially true when the time horizon for harms such as Chinese debt entrapment is much more protracted than the timescale imposed for the structural reforms (nominally) required by United States-sponsored loans.
Beyond a consideration of economic praxis, Trump’s exceptionalist demagoguery and institutional erosion have exposed plausibly intrinsic, rather than exogenous, flaws in American liberal democracy. The supersession of fractious party tribalism over both participatory and deliberative democracy — and the attendant demise of such universalising principles as multiculturalism — have eroded the perceived legitimacy of the United States’ liberalising project. More importantly, Trump’s tenure has imperilled geopolitical alliances with democratic regimes, whose foreign policy is too easily held hostage to the whims of popular sentiment. By cutting NATO financing; thwarting free trade deals like NAFTA; abrogating a hard-negotiated JCPOA; and critically, shearing from WHO in the midst of a pandemic, Trump has rent the veil from the myth of American consensus-building and multilateralism, alienating even America’s most ardent Western allies.
All the while, his administration has taken to hollowing out the State Department: the very institution intended to reassure foreign states of the United States’ resolute consistency and concern, irrespective of the given administration. Moreover, after the overthrow of Mossadegh’s Iran, the Vietnam War, the coup of Allende in Chile, “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, Obama’s Libyan insurrection, and the morbid failures of the Arab Spring, the critique usually levelled against the CCP’s disrespect for sovereignty swiftly falls flat. Before Trump, America’s heedless foreign policy record was at least garbed in eloquent gestures towards human rights and liberty. Yet under his leadership, the refined patina of virtue has melted away, leaving a president whom Western states from France to Australia are loath – even rhetorically – to stand behind. With this, China has presented as an increasingly compelling outside option for previously choice-poor state leaders.
In the police brutality which led to George Floyd’s death, the world now sees an allegory for the indemnity and iniquity with which the United States has long exercised power abroad. In the incendiary deployment of the National Guard against protesters, the world now sees the callous militarism endemic to the United States’ foreign excursions. In the visceral imagery of peaceful protesters being tear-gassed to clear the way for Donald Trump’s pious church photo, the world now sees the preacher’s perversion. In America’s willingness to foment protest overseas while quashing it at home, the world sees a system for which resistance is legitimate so long as it is external. And in the recurrence of anti-Black police brutality, the world recognises an America unwilling to learn from its mistakes.
Where to from Here?
While many authoritarians and populists have been quick to seize upon the United States’ civil unrest, and reframe themselves as pariahs to an unjust order, we should anticipate a more practiced restraint from the CCP. For China, the United States’ descent into state-sanctioned violence is less a weapon – lest they too obviously solicit whataboutist critiques – and more a shield. At the domestic and suzerain levels, China can diminish the salience of its infractions upon civil liberties by couching them in analogies to the United States. Should the United States rebuke the CCP’s repression of “troublesome” Uighurs in Xinjiang, or illiberal security laws in Hong Kong, China need only, then, shatter the glass house founded on America’s racial injustice. If anything, China can claim moral superiority to the United States on the basis of candour. For the Chinese model of state-building purports to optimise only for collective economic empowerment, and not for individual freedoms. By contrast, the American liberal-democratic dogma is an uncompromising promise of self-determination; a promise of which it has fallen drastically and hypocritically short. No longer able to demarcate between China and the United States on domestic conduct, foreign states might instead resort to their behaviour beyond their borders. On that balance, America only looks worse: as predatory as China’s lending may be, and as menacing their Indo-Pacific brinksmanship, much of the Middle East, Latin America, and Southeast Asia baulk at the United States’ ill-fated shows of hard power.
The tragedy of George Floyd will evidently be felt most sharply in the United States. But make no mistake – the world is watching.
Image Credit: Flickr/John Ramspott
