Anti-West world leaders celebrate Donald Trump as evidence of the failure of liberal democracy

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last updated 10 November 2016

World leaders at odds with the United States are using Donald Trump's election as proof that liberal democracy is a failure, The New York Times reports. "America is terribly ill," wrote Yuan Peng, the vice president of the state-run China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. Russia's state-owned media also trumpeted Trump's win as their own kind of victory, Maria Lipman of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University said it "proved Russia right."

The election of Mr. Trump on Tuesday has presented an unexpected gift to leaders — political, spiritual and ideological — who resent the encroachment of the West and now rejoice at a result that in their eyes shows how liberal democracy produces nothing but an angry populace and wild unpredictability.Mr. Trump has openly questioned some of the basic tenets of America's role in the world. Now his election has stirred confidence in America's biggest rivals, Russia and China, that they will have more room to assert their own strategic interests, whether in Ukraine, the Baltics, or the South China Sea. [The New York Times]

There is a particular kind of schadenfreude surrounding Trump's win too: "The election is being viewed as a comeuppance for a country that lectures others about the superiority of American values," the Times added.

Or, as Lipman paraphrases for Russia: "Our democracy might not be perfect, but look at theirs. It stinks."

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.