The date 6 January 2021 has gone down in US political history as the day of a Trumpian insurrection against democratic procedures in the wake of a lost presidential bid. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that this was also a timely reminder that the lived realities of civil–military relations in the United States are not radically different from the issues that Asian civil–military relations deal with. The ‘Battle of the Capitol’ revealed that citizens who were soldiers and policemen cast aside constitutional niceties to define what they personally felt were patriotic actions to defend the Republic. The policemen defending the premises of the Capitol, members of Congress and senators accused pro-Trump rioters of violating their professional oath of protecting the constitution. This was plausible in one direction because a good number of the rioters were retired military personnel who believed President Trump was the saviour of white supremacist causes in the country and legitimately won the presidential elections of 2020. It was no small irony that the rioters with military experience threw the same challenge against those defending the Capitol and the legislators within it: the enforcers of law and order were themselves breaking the oath of protecting the constitution (Steinhauer, 2021). Reflecting on the incident of 6 January, a former US Marine and intelligence officer wrote an editorial for The New York Times and commented:

In Asia, where the vast majority of political systems are republics in name only, and mostly afflicted with ‘endemic political dysfunction’ under the tumultuous challenges of nation and state-building, civil–military divides are deliberately fudged as a strategy. In many instances, the fudge transformed into a fusion to expedite national construction, political coalition, the consolidation of national identity and even defence diplomacy.