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That’s the common refrain among the American foreign policy establishment each time the nation faces a moment of internal democratic crisis, as it did during the insurrection at the federal Capitol building on 6 January.

So once again, the guardians of American diplomacy have issued their grave reminder: The world is watching.

Here’s what that watchful world will see on Inauguration Day: A fortress Washington, a city whose 700,000 denizens have made “Be safe!” a standard two-word exhortation as part of their goodbye cordialities checking out from the grocery store, hopping out of ride shares, parting from friends at the dog park.

“As we speak, there are more troops around the Capitol than there are in Afghanistan,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday in a speech on the chamber floor.

The Guard has erected fences topped with barbed wire to surround the entire Capitol complex, where the inauguration ceremony commences at 11am on Wednesday.

Democratic foreign policy leaders recognise that even if the inauguration, as expected, goes off without a hitch, Mr Trump’s fundamentally anti-democratic behaviour over the last two and a half months has all but destroyed the country’s claim as “leader of the free world.”.

The president’s stonewalling of the Biden transition team, his constant lies about a stolen election during the transition, and his incitement of the mob that stormed the Capitol on 6 January has been a “substantial blow to US credibility abroad when it comes to promoting democracy and democratic values,” House Foreign Affairs Chairman Gregory Meeks told The Independent in a statement on Tuesday.

The deadly pro-Trump insurrection at the Capitol, where five people were killed, including a US Capitol Police officer, has already provided years-worth of ammunition for the propaganda machines of authoritarians and despots around the world who will “want to frame American democracy as frail, and [claim] that they can fill the void left by Trump’s isolationism,” Mr Meeks said.

Even though Republicans and Democrats remain as divided on fundamental issues of governance as at any time in modern US history, the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has dominated the Post World War II era largely persists.

The respective Democratic and GOP foreign policy establishments do not see eye to eye on every issue, of course.

Presidential Inauguration is a time when we remind the world what a democracy looks like, how the presidential office doesn’t rest with one individual, rather with the very ideals of our free nation,” he said.

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