From the courtesies they exchanged in the preamble to what Joe Biden and Xi Jinping said between four eyes during their virtual summit, the gap between the two superpowers remains intact, as evidenced by the final statements that they each produced on their own. We did not expect anything else, given the multiple hotbeds of bilateral tension. Otherwise, the mere fact that the “working session” lasted nearly three and a half hours will have at least been, obviously, the occasion for more in-depth discussions, for lack of having been really fruitful.
The aim of the remote interview was officially to present the image of two superpowers seeking to calm things down and stave off the risk of escalation. “So that the competition does not turn into conflict,” pleaded Mr. Biden first, whether in cyberspace or in the waters of the Indo-Pacific region. The international community is grateful to them, but the result is no less fragile. Understood that neither of them has an interest in confronting the other militarily over Taiwan. The fact remains that their respective post-summit press releases were limited to the already known list of mutual grievances. So much so that Mr. Biden’s raised human rights abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong and criticized Beijing’s “unfair” trade and economic policies. And that Mr. Xi’s warned the White House not to “play with fire” on the Taiwanese question, explicitly stating that a new cold war – which he too is working to cultivate – would be “disastrous. for the world “. Words which, on both sides, offer little prospect of relaxation.
It was obviously a summit held, for both of them, for the purposes of domestic political consumption. And that is perhaps where he was most revealing, these two men embodying the bipolar state of the world today – that of an America whose democracy is failing versus that of a Chinese dictatorship firmly in the saddle. On the one hand, a Joe Biden who, seeking to get back on his feet, will in fact have projected the image of a man who can not get his head out of the water, president of a torn country politically and socially where the Donald Trump and Steve Bannons of this world still call for its overthrow. On the other, a Xi Jinping more sure of himself than ever, at the head of a China more influential than ever, a man whose totalitarian project has just been approved by the plenum of the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party. It is true that the Chinese regime is of an opacity which prevents seeing all the springs and that the country faces immense challenges of development. However, by playing the game of this summit, Mr. Xi’s stature will be amplified in China. Not that of Mr. Biden in the United States.
It is also a virtual summit which will not have, sadly, produced results in terms of collaboration in the fight against global warming. On the contrary. The COP26, which has just ended in Glasgow, has largely dampened the chances of rapid and concrete progress in the fight against deregulation. But the surprise announcement during this COP of an environmental collaboration agreement between the United States and China, the two largest emitters of CO2 to the world, will have sent a certain signal of hope. Washington had stressed that in accordance with this agreement, the ecological question would be the subject of a separate approach from other disputes. Nay. On Monday evening, Xi reportedly told Biden that cooperation on environmental matters depended on the state of the entire bilateral relationship. A sign that even on such a crucial issue, the threads of dialogue are tenuous. Too tenuous.
Mr. Biden’s schedule also means that he will meet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Thursday in Washington at a summit of the “three. amigos “. To have suffered in the “Huawei affair” the diplomacy of the hostages of Beijing at the same time as the bravery of Donald Trump, Mr. Trudeau will have an interest in arguing to Mr. Biden that the solution to his battles with China passes – but not that, of course – through greater US solidarity with its allies. However, this solidarity was lacking in the president despite his calls for multilateralism. We have seen this with the affront to France in the affair of the submarines sold to Australia. We can now see it, facing Canada, with the way in which it wants to apply ultra-protectionist economic policies – in the field in particular of the manufacture of electric cars – in the name of strict electoral calculations. Under Biden as under Trump, but differently, the United States has the unpleasant reflex of taking Canada a little too much for granted.