Dismantling Trump

The president of the USA, Joe Biden, between the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, and the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, in Brussels.OLIVIER HOSLET / EFE

More information

• Biden stages his approach to a reticent Europe for the Trump era

After each European appointment, Joe Biden has exhibited a piece of Trump's gear now in full dismantling. In Cornwall, the hostility of the new Administration towards Brexit, which Boris Johnson intends to perpetuate with an endless battle, even at the cost of the peace accords in Ulster. Also the final communiqué of the G-7, those commitments in the governance of the world that Donald Trump despised. In Brussels, first transatlantic solidarity, expressed in article 5 of the NATO Treaty on assistance between partners in the face of foreign attack, and then friendship with united Europeans, all that Trump detested. In Geneva, finally, the red lines before Vladimir Putin, the autocrat flattered by Trump who avenged himself for the geopolitical defeat suffered by Russia in the Cold War with electoral interference in the United States.

This tour is just the beginning. It is used to recover friends and mark the playing field for enemies. To Russia above all, but also to China, the strategic adversary, with the potential to challenge the United States for world leadership and democratic countries for the association between prosperity and well-being with the rule of law and individual freedoms. This meeting in Geneva, in which the Russian president appears as the recognized interlocutor, is the last performance of Trump's victory in 2016. In return, he receives directly from Biden the map of the limits that he must not cross at the risk of finding himself with a White House that abhors Trumpist sympathies with authoritarian regimes.

The place chosen for the meeting is eloquent. He tells us about the bipolar world, about the historical summits between Russians and Americans and, above all, about the meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, which represented the beginning of the end of the Cold War, with an outcome that Putin described as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century ”. Only in his head does that summit in the middle of the nuclear age have something to do with the present meeting at the time of the cyber wars. Then it was a question of establishing relationships of trust, now only to regain predictability and stability. Russia and the US and their presidents are in the worst moment of their relations since then and the only thing that can be hoped now is that they do not make things worse between them.

Biden arrived in Geneva reinforced, on his way to regain the title of leader of the free world that Trump had thrown away. He still lacks the difficult guarantee of irreversibility: that neither Trump nor another Trumpist will make him a parenthesis to Putin's delight in his 25 consecutive years as an autocrat. Democracies are closing ranks around his presidency, so the symmetrical reaction of the autocracies cannot be surprising. Moscow created the Warsaw Pact in 1955 in reaction to the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949 and, especially, to the incorporation of the Federal Republic of Germany into NATO.

The core of the new autocratic alliance already exists. Putin is the first swordsman, but the one who will command is Xi Jinping. The danger that Russia represents is above all tactical, circumstantial, as an effective power in destabilizing and exploiting the weaknesses of others. The rise of China, on the other hand, leads to a serious project of economic, political and military hegemony, first in Asia, the new center or pivot of the world, and then, thanks to the control of the center, the entire planet. If this is a cold war, it is not Putin who represents the other pole, but Xi Jinping, the true interlocutor in the strategic dialogue of the future.