The United States no longer wants (and cannot) be the police of the world

As it happened, the 80th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor fell on the week in which Joe Biden threatened Putin with "serious economic sanctions" if he decided to invade Ukraine, where he has said he will not send troops, and in which he celebrated a rhetorical Summit of Democracy, which on December 9 brought virtually 110 countries to the table of good words. That Japanese bombardment brought the country out of its reverie, pushed it into World War II and marked the beginning of an era in its international relations for Washington. Once this has been overcome, the recent gestures speak eloquently of the president's new style of foreign policy, characterized by caution and restraint: in the new world order, the United States no longer wants (and surely cannot) exercise its role as police of the world. .

Another proof that things have changed was offered in the summer by the withdrawal from Afghanistan, a decision that marked the first 11 months of the presidency and was supported by internal polls and a majority of analysts in Washington.

It was not, behind its chaotic facade, an improvisation: it obeyed the plan of an empire at the crossroads.

"The bar for intervention abroad has risen a lot," says Charles A. Kupchan, professor at Georgetown University, researcher at the

Washington Council on Foreign Relations

, and author of

(Isolationism: The History of America's Efforts to Protect itself from the World, Oxford University Press, 2020).

For Kupchan, Afghanistan was "a reset of geopolitical priorities, which, after two decades of focusing on the Middle East, will now focus on Europe and Asia." “American primacy is no longer taken for granted, as it was in the 20th century. And it has been convenient for Russia and China that at that time the United States has been waging eternal wars in places like Iraq, Syria or Libya. The Pearl Harbor era, which marked the beginning of liberal internationalism and a consensus between Democrats and Republicans, is history. Donald Trump's 'America First' finished off that consensus, "he adds.

Biden moved into Trump's ruined foreign policy edifice as the president with the most experience in the field since George Bush Sr. (1989-1993), and that background makes him trust, according to his aides, in his instinct for international relations. . He was vice president under Obama, when the United States did not intervene in Syria, despite the fact that he warned that he would do so if Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons (he did so in 2013), and when the threat to Putin of severe economic sanctions did little to help in the face of the invasion. and subsequent annexation of Crimea in March 2014. His priorities when he arrived at the White House were summed up in “the three ces”: the climate, China and the coronavirus. And in his talent for the slogan he raised a revolution that he defined as "the foreign policy of the middle class",pursuing the ideal of a just global economy with working people, a demographic that has already endured enough images of children coming home from remote locations in coffins draped in the American flag.

“[Biden] I was starting from a very complicated place. There has been a lot to rebuild, not only abroad, but also purely bureaucratic; the organization chart of the State Department [at the head of which he put Antony Blinken, an experienced cosmopolitan], was very damaged ", clarifies to EL PAÍS Judah Grunstein, director of World Politics Review, who defines the president's foreign policy as" a combination of idealistic declarations [the Democracy Summit, the diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics] and pragmatic actions ”, such as the Aukus agreement, reached with the United Kingdom and Australia to put an end to China in the Indo-Pacific zone. Peaceful.

“In these first months he has focused on restoring multilateral relations.

Will that be enough to face the crises that are on the table?

I have my doubts;

for the moment, the lack of specificity is marking his mandate ”, explains in a telephone conversation Stephen Wertheim, researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of

(Tomorrow, The World: The Birth of America's Global Supremacy, Belknap Press, 2020).

The pandemic has prevented Biden from traveling as much as he would have liked to restore his country's image as a "team player" to the world, according to Kupchan. The analyst defines this era as “the era of mixed bipolarity”, as opposed to the unipolar order “that brought the end of the Cold War”. With a difference: “For the first time in its history, Washington faces a competitor at all levels, China. The USSR was not. Its GDP never exceeded 55% of that of the United States. This time it is different. Soon we will be in a world in which the Chinese economy will be the largest. And we are already in a world in which two-thirds of the countries do more business with them than with us ”. A growing group of Washington analysts also give China the military ability to take on the United States over Taiwan.

Biden attends the Democracy Summit, held on December 9.

LEAH MILLIS (REUTERS)

Biden was also forced by the pandemic to virtually hold the Democracy Summit, an initiative that "does not seem to have brought too much, neither good nor bad," Wertheim believes.

Kupchan was at least reassured that he didn't come up with the "them versus us" rhetoric.

"Biden is obsessed, as he made clear in the campaign, with strengthening democracies, and that honors him, but presenting the matter as a fight between democracies and autocracies is a mistake," he considers.

“We are faced with a world in which it is highly interconnected and power is more diffuse than ever.

Without going to the extremes of Trump, there is no other choice but to collaborate with those regimes ”.

Attorney Anne Marie-Slaughter, CEO of the

New America, went further in an article published in November on the cover of

debate supplement

In it, he defended a "globalist" approach, which sees the world "as a place inhabited by eight billion people and not only divided into 195 countries." "From a perspective that takes into account people, the most urgent objective must be to save the planet," argued Slaughter, adding that fighting with China will no longer seem so important "when our cities end up submerged [due to climate change]" .

In the not so long term, all the experts consulted agree in their concern about the rescue of the nuclear agreement with Iran (which Trump abandoned in 2018) and that Biden will go no further in the Ukrainian crisis than the imposition of economic sanctions, the Military reinforcement of the eastern flank of NATO and the shipment of military equipment from Afghanistan to the border with Russia that aired this Friday

. Taiwan is different, they add, because the United States and its allies agree that China is a power that must be contained. Jake Sullivan, Biden's National Security Advisor, reaffirmed his commitment to defending the island's interests on Friday in a conversation with Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Sullivan also reacted diplomatically to Russia's latest demands document, which calls for, among other things, a written commitment that NATO will not expand towards its borders and a cessation of all military activity in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the United States. Caucasus that does not have the approval of Moscow. "It is very difficult to reach agreements when the escalation [of tension] does not stop," Sullivan said.

Analysts also share the view that Latin America is not being a priority.

A Mexican official in Washington acknowledges that, at least, the dialogue has improved in recent months.

Thomas A. Shannon, Undersecretary of State with Obama, considered in a recent conversation with EL PAÍS that “Biden needs time [in the region].

I don't think it is making slow progress in Latin America;

I believe that it is advancing carefully and without haste ”.

It seems clear that there are other emergencies and they are not on this continent.

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