"World" editorial. Rarely profession of faith will have sounded so false. In a plea on Western values aimed at strengthening the transatlantic link, before the Munich security conference on Saturday 15 February, the head of the American diplomacy, Mike Pompeo, invoked the rule of law and the attachment of states -United with democracy.
The West, a cold war community, is in much better health than some people claim in Europe, said Pompeo. "The West is victorious. Freedom and democracy are victorious. We respect the rule of law. "
If these arguments were effective at the time when the unity of the Western "block" was forged around the American leadership against the Soviet ideology, they are, unfortunately, less and less credible when they emanate from the team of the president Donald Trump. While European democracies are shaken by the rise of populist movements and far-right parties, the United States no longer appears as the promoters of liberal democracy, but, on the contrary, as the matrix of this "illiberal" challenge .
The famous "Scintillating city on the hill" which attracted pilgrims to the end of their transatlantic odyssey, praised by President Ronald Reagan, has been replaced by "Trumpism", a very personal form of the exercise of power, which constantly tests the safeguards of the system American politics, the famous checks and scales.
Attempts to exploit diplomatic staff
In the past week alone, Donald Trump, strengthened by his acquittal in a dismissal trial of which he challenged all the rules, defended his practice of public intervention in the judicial system; to his Minister of Justice, Attorney General William Barr, who complained that he could not work serenely in an environment where presidential Tweeters constantly disturbed the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, M Trump reaffirmed his "Legal right" of "Do what[he] wanted as president ". One can hardly imagine a more flagrant contradiction of the democratic principle of the separation of powers.
The US chief executive also questioned the well-established practice of sharing with his teams the tapping of his telephone interviews with foreign leaders, the source of his indictment in the impeachment trial. The hearings in Congress within the framework of this procedure also highlighted systematic attempts to exploit diplomatic staff for internal political purposes which are not to the credit of Mr. Pompeo, who is supposed to protect them.
These are just the latest examples of the Trump administration’s snags at what is known as the rule of law in a democracy, which is essentially about abiding by the rules of the Constitution. More generally, Trumpism is marked by a permanent climate of insults and personal attacks against representatives of the opposition and by the denial of facts and truth as the basis of information; journalists, on the other hand, are denounced as "Enemies of the people".
It’s not exactly what you can call "Victory of freedom and democracy". By his methods, Mr. Trump, on the contrary, makes them more vulnerable to the regimes he claims to counter.
