The weight rests entirely on the shoulders of an elderly gentleman, more than eighty years old, head of a team whose task is to demonstrate, first at home and immediately afterwards in the world, that the United States is always a city upon a hill, a city – bright – on the hill. It is not the first time in almost 250 years of national history that the political leadership has been called to this difficult task, such as the new president Joseph R. Biden he recalled in his inaugural speech on 20 January. And it is not the first time that the country has shown deep divisions, always understudied and underestimated in a Europe which, loving them or loathing them, has nonetheless seen the United States for at least a century as something unique, gigantic, mysterious before, powerful then, indecipherable today, perhaps finished tomorrow.
THE CRACKS IN US HISTORY
Our memory tends to remember essentially, in terms of divisions in American society, the crux of racism and the revolt against the war in Vietnam. There's so much more. America split early, well over 200 years ago, over how to order the Republic, federal or confederal; fought a bloody civil war eventually over this one, half a century later; it split between rich and poor, big cities and agricultural suburbs in the early 900s, and was so divided that the Federal Reserve, an idea detested by the suburbs but fundamental to creating the monetary power of the dollar, was created as long as possible in secret, in 1913; he split harshly over the international role denied by Congress in 1919 to President Wilson, who went almost mad; it destroyed its diplomacy in the 20s and beyond, with appalling cuts to the foreign budget imposed by Congress, in the name of isolationism, while its bankers were however becoming the world's safe, a blatant and nefarious inconsistency; split very hard on the Rooseveltian New Deal; and finally led a long internal battle, from 1947 to 52, concluded only with the ascent of General Dwight Eisenhower to the presidency, to get the new diplomatic and military commitments approved in 47, with 13 out of 96 senators who voted against the Alliance Atlantica in July 49. By comparison, a petition for support for the Alliance and NATO in July 2018, while Trump was on his way to an Allied summit in Brussels after repeatedly attacking the Alliance and its usefulness to the United States, is resolved with only two votes against. But opinion polls indicated an indifference to a much wider Europe.
DIALOGUE AND ISOLATIONISM
Today the United States is a country with two nations, those who want to dialogue with the rest of the world and those who want to decide for themselves, trusting the weight that American decisions will impose on others, just as the Midwestern nationalists wanted 120 years ago and the isolationists of the 20s and 30s. The "Trumpists" to the bitter end are their heirs, accompanied by conspiracy theories that even then they were not lacking, and of colossal fantasies and lies. In many respects, but not for all, the opposition, as demonstrated by the assault on Congress by the rowdy crowd incited by Trump himself on January 6, has never been so tough.
There is no doubt that Biden, for ideas, feelings, history, fully belongs to the first nation, that of concrete and constant dialogue. There is no doubt that he is the best living heir of the great season of American diplomacy of the 40s and 50s, an assiduous visitor for 40 years on the global scene and especially the European one. But there is no doubt that America is very different from that of the American myth. America must decide what America is today, a country like any other, only bigger and more geographically fortunate, and mind its own business, brutally if necessary, or something in any case peculiar, capable of leading at times towards better solutions, after deciding what your own business is. In short, they have to decide whether the world is an inevitable companion or a nuisance, in the illusion that it is avoidable; they have to decide if there is still something called American Century, revised downsized but still concrete, or if it is, was, a completely closed season. America first, old nineteenth-century slogan dusted off by Donald Trump and always ready in the American ideological paraphernalia, that is america alone.
Biden was greeted with great relief by all democracies, and with joy in Europe. A document drawn up by the EU Commission in early December professes enthusiasm, calls for a US-EU bilateral summit by June, proposes common actions starting from anti-pandemic health care to move on to wider-ranging commitments, strategic economic diplomats, in line with the Summit for Democracy immediately proposed by Biden.
This before January 6, and the scenes that forced everyone to ask: what's going on in America? “It will take a long time to clarify whether Trump was a historical aberration or a harbinger of what is yet to come”, writes former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt. In the meantime, Europe will inevitably remain cautious, because it will not be immediately clear whether a president will be able to keep his commitments or whether he will have to bow instead as Wilson had to do to the will of Congress, and the latter to the will of the noisy popular moods.
THE EXIT FROM TRUMPISM
The fear exists, it is concrete, but the weight to be attributed to it depends on the reading of the Trump phenomenon. Which has innovated, or rather "innovated", in political language, in the constant relationship via social media with the base and much more, but not in the basic ideas, and in the basic slogans. He has fished heavily into the paraphernalia of nationalism, nativism, and isolationism from the last 150 years of American history. Trump is more a symptom than a cause, a follower and not a prophet. And perhaps this will make America's exit from its negative season less impossible.
It will not be easy. Writing in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the magazine that has been a symbol of American internationalism for 99 years, former UN ambassador Samantha Power, now on Biden's team, admits that Madeleine Albright's famous definition of the United States as an "indispensable country ” has been rewritten and reads now “incompetent country”. For how it has handled the pandemic, completely absent internationally and ineffective at home; for how he has managed diplomacy with too many mistakes and, where he too has obtained results as in the Middle East last time, with little perspective; for how he handled international trade; and for how he handled the China problem, first scorching all principles of allied collaboration and then asking for a common commitment to face Beijing's hegemonic ambitions. It will be on a common policy towards Beijing that Biden will stake the new American leadership, that is, leading by convincing, and admitting non-copycat paths towards the same goal, and in the name of the same principles. For now, Europe on China is following other paths.
Trump supporters recall that before the pandemic there was almost full employment, but they forget that with a $7.800 trillion increase in federal debt Trump ranks third among all presidents by debt level. It was, his and well before the pandemic, a boom in deficits, lower taxes and more debt. According to calculations by Eugene Steuerle of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington, Trump beats some champions of the debt ranking such as Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, and neither did he, unlike the top two in the standings, Abraham Lincoln and George W. Bush, finance a tough Civil War or two distant wars. "We have a debt of 21 trillion and when my tax cuts (from 2017, ed) make themselves felt we will pay it like water", declared Trump in July 2018. We are at 28 trillion, just under 100% of the GDP touched during World War II, and with the federal debt count being, in the United States, quite far from calculating the entire national debt.
This is also the America that Joe Biden inherits and one can only wish him good luck. But Europe is involved. We all have to ask ourselves, as Carl Bildt does, who else can we talk freely and understand each other: “If Europe's traditional and natural ally is no longer reliable, where are we going?” If the old Biden succeeds, not to bring back an America that no longer exists to build a world that is even less, but to return to rationality and courage, it will not be the first time that those who bet on the end of America loses the game.
