A specialist in international and defense issues, Hadrien Desuin is an essayist. He has published
La France atlantiste ou le naufrage de la diplomatie
(ed. Du Cerf, 2017).
FIGAROVOX.
- Joe Biden, affirmed that Vladimir Poutine was "a killer" and that he would pay "the price".
In your opinion, is this a mistake on the part of the American president?
Hadrien DESUIN.
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Of course, Vladimir Poutine is not a child at heart, but let us not pretend to discover it, with the turning of a report of the security services of the United States and at the microphone of a journalist.
This is not a clumsiness but a fault.
Joe Biden was Vice President of the United States for eight years, he led the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee for years, he cannot behave like a retired cowboy or an Amnesty International activist.
We do not treat the major security issues of the world with insults and invectives, especially when we also give lessons in democratic liberalism to our predecessor and to the whole world.
Vladimir Putin took advantage of the incident to show that Russia is a great power with which we must discuss seriously.
Fortunately Vladimir Putin did not take this slippage seriously and relegated it to the level where it should have remained, that of a bad joke.
Better still, by proposing a direct exchange between him and the new American president, he took advantage of the incident to show that Russia is a great power with which we must discuss seriously.
Does Joe Biden break with the diplomacy carried out during the mandate of Donald Trump?
Contrary to what many analysts and commentators have believed, the Trump administration has never pursued a pro-Russian foreign policy - quite the contrary.
Just reread the speeches of Jim Mattis and Mike Pompeo.
Admittedly, Trump tried to maintain a direct or even friendly dialogue with Putin, in Helsinki in particular, but all of Washington remained frozen in a cold war mentality, headlong in the face of Moscow.
As for the American posture towards China, the summit which is being held in Alaska at the moment shows that the Sino-American relations are more frigid than ever.
So I would say that there is no rupture but only an inflection in the discourse, more liberal, more straightforward, a return to the neo-Wilsonism of the Bill and Hillary Clinton years.
Biden urge Moscow and Beijing to ally against him and renew cooperation that reached its peak under Stalin and Mao
The United States is devoting its attacks on its two great potential rivals for world domination, Russia and China;
two countries that reject the American democratic model.
But by attacking both at the same time, Biden pushes Moscow and Beijing to ally against him and to renew a cooperation which had its peak under Stalin and Mao, which one cannot wish.
The new president was elected senator from Delaware when Nixon was still in the White House and sent Henry Kissinger to meet with Chou.
They understood that China and Russia were geopolitically inclined towards rivalry rather than alliance.
Biden would do well to take inspiration from their realistic practice of international relations.
These remarks prompted the recall of the diplomat from the Kremlin to Washington.
Can Russian-American diplomatic relations deteriorate as a result of this incident?
Russian-American relations are already more degraded than in the days of Reagan and Gorbachev.
If they deteriorated further, we could then speak of a second cold war.
But this is not in the intentions of Washington and Moscow.
For my part, I wonder if Joe Biden, who is currently trying to get out of Afghanistan and Syria completely, is not giving up his public opinion with a very aggressive speech in the direction of Russia and China.
These invectives would then be like a smokescreen intended to mask the American withdrawal from the Middle East and the nuclear renegotiation with Iran.
Biden does not want to portray an image of the United States that is that of an aged and tired power, he gives his fellow citizens the manly and warlike vocabulary they expect, that of a sheriff who brings justice to the borders of the world.
Unfortunately the voice has derailed, to the delight of Vladimir Putin.
