As with Chinese President Xi Jinping three weeks ago, Joe Biden agreed to meet on Tuesday at a virtual summit with Vladimir Putin to seek, not without tinting it with (vain) threats, a way of diplomatic dialogue. There on the Taiwanese question, here around the Ukraine. Illustration could not be more telling, by consecutive summits, of the convergence of Sino-Russian interests vis-à-vis the United States. Proof that an unavoidable “triangular configuration” of international relations is taking shape, as the history professor Samir Saul wrote in May on the Ideas page of the To have to. Even though Moscow and Beijing are not really on the same level in their concurrent showdown with Washington: where the Kremlin is in search of geopolitical respect, which Mr. Putin considers to have succeeded in doing with this summit, the rise China’s economic policy automatically imposes this respect.
If Putin’s authoritarian drift is obvious, we too often forget that history – read the very imperialist contempt displayed by the Americans for Russia in the wake of the collapse of the USSR – has had a lot to do with it. in the current state of things. If Russia is today very conspicuously massing troops along the Ukrainian border, it is in part because Mr. Putin and a large part of his compatriots still consider Russians and Ukrainians to be “one people” and that the The West betrayed in the 1990s its promise not to extend NATO’s tentacles to the former Eastern countries.
To these insoluble historical tensions, Mr. Putin, master of the nuisance effect, reacts today as he did for the first time last May: with a fabricated military escalation, thanks to which he can vibrate in its lands the nationalist cord. We knew that Tuesday’s summit would not lead to anything specific diplomatically, as the positions are irreconcilable. It was out of the question for Biden to assure Putin that NATO will stop encroaching on the “Russian sphere of influence,” while it is clear that NATO will not make the provocative mistake of inviting Kiev, who would like to, to join its ranks. So much so that the conflict in Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, is likely to linger for a long time to come. It costs Putin nothing to overstate the risks of an armed invasion since the idea is absolutely not considered, beyond the billions of dollars already provided to Kiev in military support, to send American troops or to NATO in Ukraine in the event of major Russian attacks.
Biden may well have warned the Russian president of “strong sanctions” in the event of escalation, his threats are rather unconvincing, given that his options are limited. The White House has raised the possibility that the new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline through which Russia will supply natural gas to Germany may be blocked, but this avenue is currently very frowned upon in Berlin. There is also a “nuclear option” of excluding Russia from the Swift financial information exchange system, but that would also harm European countries that do business with it. With the result that instead of wielding threats that are difficult to carry out, Mr. Biden instead gives the impression that the United States is increasingly handcuffed – to Russia, to China. The American Empire is naked.
Moreover, this summit illustrates a very sad reality, namely that diplomatic action is, again and again, too often behind the military. Suffice it to point out that the United Nations has raised the risk of “Famines of biblical proportions” in 2021 and that, according to an open letter published by 200 NGOs last April, the equivalent of 26 hours of military spending worldwide would be enough to finance the five billion dollars urgently needed to curb hunger in the world.
We would like to believe, from this to that, that another summit, the one for democracy which takes place on Thursday and Friday in virtual mode at the initiative of Mr. Biden, will seek to break with this dynamic. Wishful thinking. One hundred and ten countries will come to discuss human rights, civil liberties and the right to vote, according to a long list of guests who cringe (the Philippines of Rodrigo Duterte will be there, but not Hungary nor Turkey…). Obviously annoyed, first by the presence of Taiwan, then by the diplomatic boycott of the Olympic Games – which Canada has just joined -, China mocked this summit, posing, nothing less, in “democracy”. exemplary ”and calling the United States a“ plutocracy ”. Virtual summit, virtual democracies. The wind of illiberalism is blowing strong, very strong. For the United States, it is above all the challenge of saving itself that American democracy faces.