AnalysisThe Democratic candidate promises, in the event of victory on November 3, to bring together his allies mistreated by Donald Trump, to try to reconnect with multilateralism in the face of authoritarian abuses in certain countries.
Since Joe Biden left the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, where the Vice Presidents reside, almost four years have passed: both a parenthesis and an eternity. If he returned to business after the November 3 presidential election, the Democrat would reconnect with officials like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, or Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But he would also find the Hungarian prime ministers, Viktor Orban, and Israeli, Benyamin Netanyahu, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed Ben Salman, the Russian president Vladimir Poutine, the Turkish Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Chinese Xi Jinping, the actors of the distraught from a world that is both familiar and different. Because he would also inherit the mandate of Donald Trump.
The latter fueled a historic crisis of confidence among Washington’s allies. It has weakened what remains of multilateralism, especially in the fight against global warming or the containment of Iran’s nuclear military ambitions. He damaged the image that the United States gives of itself and relativized, as never before him, the values that his country has always claimed to defend.
If elected, Joe Biden would reach the end of a long quest, which began in 1973 when he became a senator from Delaware in his early thirties. Within the Upper House, the chairmanship of the prestigious Foreign Affairs Committee gave him the diplomatic culture deemed essential to take place behind the Resolute Desk (the office of American presidents). This expertise had encouraged Barack Obama, in 2008, to make him his running mate after a second unsuccessful presidential campaign by Joe Biden.
The man who slices
Once in the Oval Office, Joe Biden would this time become the man who decides in the last resort. Not a vice-president battling against an entourage to stop the axes of the foreign policy of the United States. Not a salesperson responsible for traveling the world, tirelessly, to defend the choices of another.
At first glance, Joe Biden presents all the stigmas of the internationalist democrat. He voted in 2002 for US intervention in Iraq, having campaigned the previous decade for US strikes against Serbia in the Kosovo War (1998-1999). The reality of its interventionism is however more complex. The Delaware senator opposed the first American intervention in the Gulf, in 1991, after the invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi troops. He also very quickly regretted his vote of 2002 and pleaded for an ethnic and confessional partition of Iraq under the cover of federalism, to allow a rapid departure of the American troops.
You have 84.2% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.
