“Almost a year after Donald Trump’s departure, doubts still loom over the strength of American democracy”

IHe is, in his own way, the embodiment of the American dream. The daughter of an unemployed miner in the north-east of England, devastated by de-industrialization and Thatcherism, Fiona Hill was urged by her father to leave in the 1980s, as he told her one day, “There’s nothing here for you, my little one”,

The young Fiona, the scholarship holder, studied brilliantly at St Andrews in Scotland, Moscow, then Harvard, becoming one of the best experts in Russia of her generation, took American nationality and found herself in charge of the Russian file within the Security Council. Found. President Donald Trump’s Council. The general public discovered him on television screens in 2019, when, directly as an I, he testified against the president in front of elected congressmen. who were investigating his dismissal suit.

After becoming a researcher again at the Brookings Institution, Fiona Hill has just published a book that has attracted a lot of attention in the United States. Its title is a warning to his father: there’s nothing here for you (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, translated). It’s not just about his time in the White House; She certainly talks about Russia, her native England, and her adopted country, the United States. But most of all, she says how the visit leads her to identify her greatest concern: the state of American democracy.

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“I saw with my own eyes how vulnerable America is to the political crises afflicting Russia”, she writes. In 2019, she understood “That America followed its own authoritarian drift”, In 2020, she saw the pandemic bring the world’s leading power “on the verge of systemic bankruptcy”, Despite Trump’s departure in 2021, she remains extremely pessimistic.

Yet it is a country with a faltering democracy that is holding a “Summit for Democracy” on December 9 and 10 – via videoconference – for which the State Department already divided the good and bad points, By what criteria, we do not know: the list is careful not to specify. While some options seem obvious – Taiwan yes, China no – others are skeptical. Hungary is excluded, but Poland is invited. Bosnia and Herzegovina will not be there, but Serbia has been invited. Turkey, a NATO ally, is eventually sidelined, but Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil will be received with open arms. Pakistan, Philippines are also in the game.

Joe Biden was Released the idea of ​​this summit in January 2020. he wanted “Convince other democratic leaders to put the strength of democracy on the world’s agenda”, In fact, it required little effort: many of these “Other Democratic Leaders”Europeans, in particular, had some reservations about the usefulness of this great venture, rather than the four years of Trump rule and make it known. Furthermore, they were not involved in the preparation of the event and neither were civil society.

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