One speech, two crises. That of Ukraine, first, about which Joe Biden, before Congress, celebrated the resistance of the Ukrainians and their “iron will” while evoking the “bad calculations” of a Vladimir Putin “isolated from the world more than ever” by the sanctions. The scale of the Ukrainian tragedy serves well the American rhetoric on democracy, so revolting and dangerous is the Russian aggression at the gates of Europe. Mr. Biden had every reason to denounce it on Tuesday evening, but it should not make us forget that the history of the United States is dotted with communities of interest with a number of “autocracies”.
It is understood that we hope that his military headlong rush will inevitably lead Mr. Poutine to his downfall. Mr. Biden emphatically said he believes that once this episode is over, “Putin’s war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world [démocratique] stronger “. Which seems likely, although it amounts to subtracting from the equation the support, measured it is true, that Beijing gives to Moscow.
Then, Biden repeated, as if the Americans could doubt it, that there was no question of sending troops to Ukraine, adding in passing that the few thousand American soldiers dispatched to Europe were there in support of the NATO allies “in case Putin decides to continue west”. Which is disturbing. Mr. Biden prides himself on the strengthening of American cohesion with European countries, but the fact is that the Ukrainian crisis is at the same time giving rise to a militarization of Europe – a trend of which the new German policy speaks – , boding little, if at all, for a diplomatic solution. In the meantime, it is the Ukrainians and their fragile democracy who are paying the heavy price for decades of deteriorating Russian-American relations and the drift of the Russian regime.
Essentially, the president – as a good father – will above all have wanted to be reassuring during the hour that lasted his speech on the state of the Union, an imposed and almost always soothing figure in American political life. He was reassuring to the point of even becoming jovial, declaring, while Russian bombs were falling on Kharkiv and Kiev, that “it’s going to be fine” (” We’re going to be OK “). Really ?
Because there is the other crisis, that of the inflationary surge (7.5% in January over one year) induced by a pandemic which finally seems to be abating. A crisis to which the Democrats must pay all the more attention as mid-term legislative elections are held next November where they will have to fight tooth and nail to maintain their majority in Congress. What good is job creation and wage increases if gains are wiped out by inflation? A nail that the Republicans do not miss an opportunity to drive. On Tuesday, Mr. Biden advocated at length, as an electorally profitable protectionist reflex, the adoption of “Buy America” policies in the name of protecting the national economy, which inevitably sends shivers down the spine of Canadian businesses.
In the shorter term, the fight against inflation risks coming into conflict with the fight against Putin and putting the White House in a heartbreaking position, the challenge for it being to punish the Russian regime massively without harming the wallets of the consumers, especially at the pump. The series of financial sanctions applied to date is unprecedented and is having a severe impact on Russia (its dictatorship, but also its population, which is otherwise talked about too little). But it excludes for the moment agriculture and energy, of which it is a major exporter. If the Russian aggression continues, notes in particular the American columnist Ezra Klein, and the pressure will increase on the United States and the Europeans so that the Russian gas and oil market is also the subject of Western sanctions. With an increased boomerang effect on consumers, a possibility Biden barely dared to mention during his speech.
Putin knows all too well the dilemma this presents to the US government. The Republicans too, a significant fraction of whose members praise Vladimir Putin, as they praise Donald Trump, in the same way that the American Communists idealized Stalin at the beginning of the 20th century.and century. Wallet or democracy? How far, in this case, does the solidarity with the Ukrainians of the Western consumers that we are go, beyond our collective dismay?