Why is nobody comparing Biden to Xi Jinping?
What seems to me the strangest in the history of President Biden’s European voyage, which ended, as you know, with a meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Geneva on June 16, 2021?
The strangest circumstance seems to me to be the reaction of the press, both Russian, European and American. I will try to explain this oddity and to some extent justify it. Let’s start with the strangest thing.
It seems that there are no naive people among journalists, and they all perfectly understood what this voyage was all about, why it was, for what eyes it was intended. In part, they even talked about it, but somehow timidly, in passing, without fixing the readers’ attention. They did not seem to be worried about the purpose of the whole story with Biden’s visit to Europe, they were only interested in the extent to which the current president managed not to resemble the previous president. In the context of the meetings of the G7 and the heads of NATO, this meant how the current – democratic – America differs from the Republican in its adherence to transatlantic values, did Biden succeed or did not succeed in overcoming the legacy of Trumpism? In the context of the bilateral meeting with Putin, basically only one thing was discussed: to what extent does Geneva 2021 differ from Helsinki 2018. Republicans now say that Biden lost to Putin with a big score, Democrats – that he, unlike Trump, “didn’t lose his face” and did not agree with the Russian leader on some issue that was painful for America’s prestige.
The press is interested in seemingly mere trifles, while Biden was solving, in general, an understandable and rational problem. He wanted to demonstrate to his main external enemy, Chairman Xi, that he was able not only to rally the Euro-Atlantic against him, but also to enter into a situational partnership with two satellite states of Europe: Turkey and Russia.
This performance, titled the US is back, had one main audience who did not appear on stage in any of the acts.
If we accept this as a hypothesis, then the whole drama will become clear. And the very decision to hold a meeting of the seven not just anywhere, but in the homeland of King Arthur, in Cornwall, and the signing on June 10, 2021 with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the New Atlantic Charter, reminiscent of the Charter on August 1, 1941, which marked the alliance of the United States and Great Britain in the face of Nazism that conquered continental Europe, and Biden’s demand to include in the final G-7 communiqué a clause on transparency and respect for human rights directly addressed to Beijing, and finally the entire polar-Arctic aspect of the conversation with Putin, reasonably emphasized by the Russian leader in his press conference – all this illustrated one clear America’s priority: to create a northern, Polar-Atlantic front to contain Beijing.
Now there is a lot of talk about the fact that after the northern front there will certainly appear a southern one – the Indian-Pacific one, and it will include those large states reaching these two oceans, which will be ready to form an anti-Chinese military-economic axis under the auspices of Washington. Usually they speak in this connection about three countries – Japan, India and Australia. Sometimes observers allow South Korea to join this axis, if, of course, it dares to dissociate itself from its largest trading partner – mainland China.
Be that as it may, Biden’s geopolitics is obvious – this is an attempt to organize the containment of China’s economic and strategic power from the South and North in the hope that China will abandon its plans, fearing the possibility of pressure on the country from two hemispheres of the planet. If two oceans, the Indian and the Arctic, are closed for China at once, it will have to strongly adjust its plans for technological expansion into the Western Hemisphere. And then either start moving in the western direction, or go into traditional self-isolation.
Did Biden manage to achieve any significant results during the trip? Some of them succeeded.
Angela Merkel, the main adherent of the “old globalism” with the priorities of the free market and economic benefits, was forced to give up a little principles and join the anti-Chinese declaration. On the whole, Vladimir Putin turned out to be ready for a dialogue on global warming and environmental initiatives beyond the Arctic Circle. Of course, this is nothing more than a diplomatic shift, but the problem is that China has not yet found an opportunity to respond to it adequately, for example, with an alternative voyage of Xi to Europe and Asia with a hint that all statements with the participation of the American president are worthless. What Biden is capable of, C cannot do. So in the global conflict between the United States and China, the American leader nevertheless earned one point.
Curiously, however, nobody cares about this. The audience is somehow not particularly interested in the rivalry between the American and Chinese leaders. Nobody compares Biden and C. And this is a little weird. Imagine that US Secretary of State Baker’s trip to the Middle East in September 1990, when he met with the late Mubarak, Saudi sheikhs and even the father of the current Syrian president, Hafez Assad, would be judged by the press by the criterion of how impressive he looked against the background of his predecessors, say George Schultz or Henry Kissinger. Did he hit his face in the mud when he met Assad and was he able to convey to him concerns about human rights in Syria? And no one would have discussed the main topic – whether or not Baker managed to put together a coalition against Saddam Hussein.
And now I want to express my main thesis. The world press in its indifference to the main thing is in fact right. All this anti-Chinese bluff of Biden looks so far just a bluff for the simple reason that the Euro-Atlantic unity he desperately demonstrates in the face of China is in fact absolutely fictitious.
Russia, of course, will go in its own special way, avoiding, if possible, a conflict with both the West and the East. France and Germany are unlikely to give up not only from Russian raw materials, but also from cheap Chinese technologies, using them, among other things, in order to assert their sovereignty. Turkey’s NATO membership will be more and more formal.
And the most important challenge to Biden’s “block policy” comes, of course, from within America. According to the Rasmussen poll, only 44% of Americans considered Biden’s visit a success. I think that a significant part of them simply do not sympathize with the very purpose of this visit. They don’t want Biden to succeed at all. Even while Biden was just preparing for a meeting with Putin, it was reported that the conservative conference of American Catholic bishops sent various parishes in the United States a recommendation not to admit a Catholic president by religion before communion. The reason is Biden’s liberal position on many social issues, and primarily on the issue of abortion.
Liberal media do not hide that the conspiracy theory created by the mysterious anonym Q is gradually acquiring the character of a religious doctrine, which is shared to one degree or another by 10 to 17 percent of the population. It is hard to imagine how America, so divided on all possible issues, can claim the unification of the Euro-Atlantic under its own leadership.
America today resembles the Holy Roman Empire of Charles V, in which historians see the last attempt of the Catholic world to achieve European unity, which at that moment was undermined not so much from the outside as from within – by the reformation movement that began in the very first year of Charles’s reign. Given that Biden, as a liberal Catholic, is stubbornly associated with Pope Francis, also a liberal Catholic, the analogy between Q Anon and the spread of Protestant sects will not seem like a stretch. The Euro-Atlantic is clearly entering a new period in its history, making a new civilizational leap, and it cannot be ruled out that at the first stage it will lead to an internal split, in which religion will again play a leading role.
So I want to stand up for the press again. The fact that she stubbornly ignores the geopolitical alignments that guides Biden, and focuses on his image and ability to behave, there is a certain reason. It is obvious that any strategic constructs of the current American administration will be crossed out by its internal opponents if they achieve revenge in 2022 and especially in 2024. Biden, of course, hoped that conservative and liberal America would be reconciled by a common hostility to China: it turned out that a common enemy does not always unite opponents. Biden has not yet succeeded in creating a bipartisan consensus during the First Cold War. This worries him personally and the liberal press more than anything else. Even more than the Chinese threat. So, if we recall the slogans of the times of the civil war in Russia, the current motto of the American liberal elite sounds so far not as “All for the fight against China!”, But rather “All for the fight against Trumpism!”.
Boris Mezhuev, Federal Grid Company