I love politics, its issues, its theater. So I followed with pleasure and interest the recent American Republican and Democratic conventions, covered extensively by Quebec news networks. RDI and LCN, in fact, did not hold back, devoting dozens of hours to both events.
Was it too much? The question arises. We do not, after all, live in the United States and we do not have the right to vote there. Consequently, our fascination with the politics of this country can appear as an attitude of the colonized, admiring the power of which it is deprived.
The conventions of Canadian and Quebec political parties do not even have the right to such media coverage, even though they are likely to have a more direct influence on our living environment and we have the power to influence them.
As I listened to speeches by American political figures, some of whom I was seeing for the first time in my life, I couldn’t help but think that it would be good if we paid as much attention to our own political lives.
At the same time, I recognize that it would be foolish to pretend that American policy was, for us, a foreign policy like any other. The United States, the world’s leading economic, diplomatic, military and cultural power, is our neighbor. What happens there never takes long to color our daily lives. Would we have Poilievre here, for example, if there had not been Trump in the South?
And what is true for us is also true, to some extent, for the entire planet. Finland can change its government without the rest of the world noticing. The United States cannot. So it is normal and healthy that we should be concerned about the fate of our imposing neighbor.
There is no shortage of specialists and experts on the subject in Quebec, and they are, in many cases, fascinating. I am thinking here, among others, of Élisabeth Vallet, Karine Prémont, Rafael Jacob, Pierre Martin, Jean-François Lisée and Richard Latendresse. The master in the field, however, remains Charles-Philippe David, who knows everything about American issues, in addition to being able to explain them in a clear and warm style.
These qualities are found in The eagle in danger? (Somme toute/Le Devoir, 2024, Montreal, 134 pages), where he sets out in just under a hundred pages the challenges facing American foreign policy at a time when a return to power of the chaotic Donald Trump cannot be ruled out. “Are the United States still indispensable or will they become ‘dispensable’ in the management of international relations?”
At present, in the world, multilateralism is receding in favor of circumstantial alliances opposing competing powers, the arms race is resuming with renewed vigor and democracy is no longer even an ideal in many places. Faced with such a situation, should we hope, in the spirit of Trumpism, for an American disengagement from world affairs or a strengthening of the “moral force” that the country, moreover threatened with implosion by its ideological divide, has claimed to embody for more than a century?
A supporter of liberal internationalism committed to world peace through open and regulated trade, democracy or, at the very least, multilateralism and diplomacy, David does not hide the fears that a return to power of Trump inspires in him.
The latter, one can predict, would intensify the economic war against China, undermine NATO, abandon Ukraine and leave the world, which abhors a vacuum, at the mercy of unpredictable powers like China, Russia, Iran or Israel.
David, who wrote his book before Joe Biden announced his withdrawal, is not a blind admirer of him. He applauds his firm commitment to Ukraine, but highlights his failure to pull out American troops from Afghanistan in a confused way and his clumsy handling of the Israeli offensive in Gaza, which followed a US disengagement in favor of a peace process in the region.
On the economic front, David notes, Biden has continued Trump’s protectionist policies to the detriment of foreign policy objectives. Despite its failures, this “pragmatic realism,” which retains international ambitions and which can be presumed to be continued by a Harris presidency, is better for the world order than Trumpist isolationism, the political scientist believes.
From a Quebec perspective, the United States has many faults, David concludes, but their withdrawal from the international scene would leave us with “a more unpredictable, more chaotic and more violent world.” We are right to be concerned.