It is a moment which will never be forgotten. Caught on video, and naturally now viral, the moment when Senator James Lankford is interrupted by an aide saying, “The protestors are in the building,” will no doubt be analysed for decades to come. It represents a tipping point in what had been assumed almost to be the natural order of things—a stable world order led by the U.S.
This stability did not mean, ever, that there would not be chaos in other parts of the world—other conflicts, other upheavals, other wars. A coup was for others.
In that fateful moment on January 6, in fact, it was demonstrated that so make-belief has politics become in America that even a ‘coup attempt’ can only happen—as Bruno Maçães has memorably written—only as a role-playing farce. This would have been less sinister has there not been actual deaths during the storming of Capitol Hill. This could have been taken more seriously if it were not for the simultaneous drumroll of social media alongside, including the removal of a sitting President from Twitter and Facebook.
This could have been read as the moment when China breaks through, when the pains of the Opium Wars, the last time China challenged the hegemony of the West, could be reversed, and maybe even healed—but for those rather inconvenient facts, Hong Kong is still in turmoil, as is the Uighur issue, and Jack Ma, arguably China’s most influential business tycoon, has gone silent, and become invisible it seems, after criticising the administration.
Where does that leave the world? In unique flux. For all their contested histories, both the U.S. and China claim a certain moral power or global power for themselves. The U.S., its role as a ‘city upon a hill’, as John Winthrop famously said, and later Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy borrowed; and China as a great civilisation, one of the oldest continuing cultures in the world. Both these notions can, and have been challenged, but that these two countries derive inspiration from them is unmistakable. And therefore, it is also hard to ignore that events of the recent past make it ever more difficult for the world to see such virtues in them. Read More
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