Foreign diplomats in Washington, D.C., were on their way to dinners, concerts, and waterfront parties; nursing hangovers; and resting up from a week of wall-to-wall meetings at the NATO summit on Saturday when the news hit their phones like a lightning bolt. Former U.S. President Donald Trump had been shot at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Foreign diplomats in Washington, D.C., were on their way to dinners, concerts, and waterfront parties; nursing hangovers; and resting up from a week of wall-to-wall meetings at the NATO summit on Saturday when the news hit their phones like a lightning bolt. Former U.S. President Donald Trump had been shot at a rally in Pennsylvania.
After a NATO summit that had already been overshadowed by European officials sussing out the future of U.S. foreign policy from would-be second term Trump officials and U.S. President Joe Biden’s closely watched press conferences, foreign officials described a feeling of anxiety and alarm over the health of U.S. democracy after the apparent assassination attempt.
And they worried after living through the George Floyd protests of 2020; the Jan. 6, 2021, pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol; and the ensuing lockdown of Washington’s streets that the worst was yet to come.
“I’m very afraid that the genie is out of the bottle,” said one senior diplomat from a U.S.-allied country, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I would be very pleasantly surprised if there wasn’t violence either around the [upcoming presidential] elections, I am deeply sorry to say.”
The FBI identified 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks as the shooter at Saturday’s rally. Crooks killed one attendee and injured the former president’s right ear. As some U.S. Secret Service personnel located and killed Crooks while their colleagues rushed to move Trump to safety, the presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee showed defiance, pausing to reach past the Secret Service agents surrounding him to fist-pump to the crowd and mouth the word, “Fight!”
Even though U.S. President Joe Biden, Trump, and House Speaker Mike Johnson immediately called for Americans to dial down the hyperpartisan election tensions and rhetoric, current and former foreign officials who spoke to Foreign Policy voiced fear that the nation’s adversaries—such as Russia and China—could take advantage of a new pattern of U.S. domestic political violence.
“[If] America polarizes even more after this crime, it will be a big win for Russia,” said one former Eastern European ambassador to Washington. “Because instead of concentrating on real enemies … Americans will be concentrating on killing each other. And that’s a nightmare scenario for us.”
Russian state propaganda outlets and troll farms quickly began churning out new narratives to try to sow further divisions in U.S. politics, with some Russian media personalities falsely claiming that Biden or Ukrainian special forces were behind the assassination attempt and others asserting the incident would trigger a U.S. civil war.
“They need war inside of America to win the war in Ukraine,” the former Eastern European ambassador said of the Kremlin’s disinformation strategy.
U.S. allies have weathered plenty of American political crises before, of course, including attempted and successful assassinations. After the 1981 failed assassination attempt against then-President Ronald Reagan, for instance, U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig told reporters at the White House that he was in charge, even though he wasn’t in the chain of presidential succession.
But after the recent tumult of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests, the Capitol riot, and now a would-be assassin’s bullet nearly killing a former president and current presidential candidate, U.S. allies are less optimistic about Washington’s ability to handle major systemic shocks.
“After the assassination attempt of Reagan, there was much more confidence in the U.S. system for allies,” the senior U.S.-allied diplomat said. “No one doubted that the system could function and carry through then. But now? There are big doubts.”
Even though both congressional Democrats and Republicans were quick to jump on the U.S. Secret Service for failing to prevent the shooter from accessing the rooftop from which he fired—which was located outside the security perimeter of Saturday’s event but still within firing range of the former president and the crowd—another European diplomat in Washington was impressed by how authorities responded.
“American institutions are strong, they proved that, [and] they immediately provided protection,” the person said. “It’s a shock to hear that this can happen, but you look at the resilience piece to it, the response was very strong from the administration.”
But the assassination attempt immediately shifted the focus away from foreign policy. The drama of the U.S. presidential campaign was already jamming up diplomatic business before Saturday’s assassination attempt. Although current and former European officials said that last week’s NATO summit in Washington was well-scripted and well-executed, it was already partially—if not fully—overshadowed by politics.
And in a year where much of the world is holding or has already held elections, former European officials are worried about the potential of a spillover effect. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, who survived an assassination attempt in March, compared Trump’s shooting to his own. The European Parliament elections in Germany and snap elections in France saw unusual political violence.
“It’s not U.S.-specific, even though the presence of automatic rifles does make it more visible,” said Camille Grand, a former assistant secretary-general for defense investment at NATO who is now a distinguished policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “All of this fuels the general story about democracies becoming less and less functional.”
But the threat of U.S. political chaos could seize up the Western foreign-policy agenda much more than instability in Germany or France, Grand said. And in the near term, it has turned all eyes to the campaign trail. Several European countries are also planning to send diplomats to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week as well as next month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago to network with the national security teams on both campaigns and get a feel for U.S. foreign policy over the next four years.
Still, with Trump tweaking his convention speech from attacks on Biden to a message of unity, some European diplomats remained hopeful that the United States would emerge from the crisis more united. For many foreign officials, whatever Biden and the Democrats had to say on the subject of political violence seemed like an afterthought.
“We are now crossing our fingers and waiting for Trump’s convention speech,” said the former Eastern European ambassador. “Because that will be quite an important guideline where America will actually go next.”
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