Many foreign leaders - and especially Washington's allies - will have watched the events this week on Capitol Hill with amazement and alarm. Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg was one of the first to respond, tweeting "shocking scenes in Washington DC. The outcome of this democratic election must be respected". Who could ever have imagined such a comment, coming from the alliance's top official addressed to its leading member state? It is the sort of thing you would expect Mr Stoltenberg to be sending to a Belarus or a Venezuela. The episode says much about Washington's standing in the world after four years of the Donald Trump presidency. The US has haemorrhaged both influence and soft power. It has pulled out of arms control agreements, the Iran nuclear deal, and a major climate accord. It has sought to reduce its military engagements overseas while offering little in the way of diplomatic alternatives. Countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have all, to an extent, sought to provide for their own security, mindful that the US president's attention span is limited. Indeed Donald Trump often appears to regard authoritarian leaders as more convivial hosts than the heads of government of many of his democratic allies. The forces of attraction that made the country a model for aspiring democrats everywhere are tarnished, its fissures are there for all to see. Today, as analyst Ian Bremmer notes: "The US is by far the most politically dysfunctional and divided of all the world's advanced industrial democracies." This matters because, over recent years, the international system has clearly suffered from Mr Trump's decision to pursue an America First policy. Authoritarians are on the march. China and Russia both feel their influence has been bolstered during the Trump years. The institutions of the liberal order - like Nato, the UN and many of its agencies - face varying degrees of crisis. Cyber-attacks and so-called grey-zone operations - just short of the threshold of war - are becoming commonplace. The world faces acute crises like the pandemic and climate change and under Mr Trump's watch, the US has simply not turned up for duty. Let's be clear here. This is not a call for US dominion over the globe. Often an expansive US foreign policy has been as much a part of the problem as part of any solution. But US defence and security policy is not in a good place. The whole fabric of arms control agreements inherited from the Cold War years, from the INF treaty to Open Skies, is crumbling. Indeed a last-ditch effort to renew the last accord constraining the US and Russian arsenals of strategic nuclear weapons - the New Start treaty - will be an early item on President-elect Joe Biden's agenda. Arms control is gaining greater importance as deadly new weapons systems like high-speed hypersonic missiles are developed, not to mention the growing militarisation of space. The west has to contend with the rise of a more assertive China and the return of a more aggressive Russia. So US involvement, leadership, call it what you will, is essential to even start grappling with the underlying issues involved. This all poses huge problems for the incoming Biden administration. Washington's enemies are on a high after the storming of the Capitol. The new president arrives in power with China's economy already rebounding from the pandemic whilst America's Covid response is failing badly with massive death rates and uncertainty about the effectiveness of the vaccine roll-out. Indeed the pandemic is an issue that President Trump has largely ignored since his election defeat. No wonder then that the Chinese President Xi Jinping is convinced that the crisis has demonstrated the superiority of his system. Russia may be more of an irritant than a strategic competitor for Washington, but the disinformation and hacking operations that book-ended the Trump years are something radically new in scale and impact. Joe Biden will be at the helm of an administration where many of its agencies are using computer systems that have been penetrated by the Russians. Nobody yet knows how deep or how permanent this intrusion might be. Even among America's friends the new administration's course is unlikely to all be plain sailing. Of course the new president will be warmly welcomed by Washington's allies abroad, especially within the EU and the G7 groupings. Others like the Saudis, the Turks and the Israelis are rapidly triangulating or re-adjusting their policies, seeking to enable a new dialogue with the Biden team. But don't expect any honeymoon for the new US administration to last long. The divisions within the Atlantic alliance for example may be papered over fairly quickly. But Mr Biden is going to place demands on his European partners just as the Trump administration did. He will also want more defence spending and in addition concerted and tough policies towards Iran, China and Russia.