With an 82-year-old candidate at the american presidential vote in November 2024 and the other of 78 if it will be Donald Trump the challenger, it would be easy to foreshadow a great show with apotheosis of the fourth age. But the stakes are very high. Not only for the Americans, which interests us indirectly, but also for a Europe that has largely confirmed with the Ukrainian affair its strategic dependence on NATO and therefore on Washington, and which must also decide how to take sides in the great chess game between the United States and China for global supremacy.
Foreign policy in the US election campaign
La foreign policy it will be less secondary than usual in the 2024 American electoral debate, and not just because of the bad relations with Moscow. The global economic realignment, the end of globalization, the decoupling, i.e. the (relative) uncoupling between the American and Chinese economies, the possibility of a restoring, i.e. of a shift of activity today in China, or even of a friendly-reshoring ofreendshoring, i.e. investments in friendly countries as proposed by Treasury Minister Janet Yellen. All while gigantic aid to American industry instead the melodies of protectionism are ringing for now. We are now at decisive moves, and everything will be at the center of the American electoral debate, given the wide repercussions of relations with Beijing on domestic economic policy.
French President Emmanuel Macron has stated that in the Chinese case, Europe cannot replicate American positions. But everything remains to be seen.
It has been since 2020 that America has been preparing the answer to the MIC 2025, il floor Made in China with which Beijing envisages three stages: less dependence on foreign countries, creating national champions to dominate the domestic market, launching these champions on the global market. It was developed in 2015, after China had become the world's leading manufacturing country in terms of added value in 2010, and has already had its effects felt on various international groups, including Italian ones such as Danieli (steel industry), which are differentiating to the past and focusing less on China.
Europe remains with its back to the wall
La war in Ukraine it has cornered a Europe incapable of going beyond national dimensions. A lot of history but little present, you learn, among other things, by yourself, how to manage Russian revanchism. What could be applied to the entire European assembly Dean Acheson, former US Secretary of State, said of Great Britain in 1962: "It has lost an empire, and has not yet regained a role". Several times the Euro-American Henry Kissinger he glanced over. “The United States” she wrote in 2014 in World Order, “has every historical and geopolitical reason to support the European Union and prevent its sliding into a geopolitical vacuum; the United States, if separated from Europe in politics, economy and defense, would in fact geopolitically become an island on the shores of Eurasia, and Europe itself would be reduced to an appendage to the spheres of action of Asia and the Middle East ”. And he added: “Europe, which had a near-monopoly in shaping the global order less than a century ago, runs the risk of cut himself off from the contemporary quest for a world order identifying its internal construction as its ultimate geopolitical mission”. In short, a contemplation of one's navel, and this while America, especially the less educated white Americans, feel more like children of the isolationists than of the great diplomats who created the Western system and the link with Europe 75 years ago. Kissinger's judgments are weighty but realistic, more in keeping with the way of thinking than Joe Biden and completely unrelated to that of Donald Trump, who sums up his thoughts in the slogan as known MAGA, Make America Great Again. How, we don't know.
Trump: underrated or overrated?
In 2016, Europeans, even more than many Americans, they underestimated Trump, who already in January of that year, if not before, showed a good chance of making it. Basically for two reasons: the weakness of Hillary Clinton, an unsuitable candidate for an anti-Washington season, and the disappointment suffered by various popular strata such as whites without university education with Obama, an anti-establishment populist as a candidate, defender of the establishment ( financial, first of all) as soon as elected president, in the midst of the great bank crash of 2008; it should never be forgotten that of the 700 American counties (3143 in total) that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, more than 200 awarded Trump in 2016, and this made the difference in Midwestern former industrialist.
Anyway Trump narrowly won for 80 votes in three key states, winning their electoral votes. Just as for not long, in the electoral vote, Biden won four years later. Today many European observers instead they overrate Trump, stopping to consider that scarce 30% of the Republican electorate who, according to the most reliable polls, remain faithful or very faithful to him despite all the scandals, the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 vote in various states, the assault by his gangs on the Congress, the judicial proceedings which, among other things, make him a martyr, the disorderly and maniacal style of government to say the least. With this basic support, Trump is and will remain the frontrunner, the number one candidate, for the Republicans for a long time into 2023. But the games will be played in 10-12 months.
Biden announced now the intention to ask for a new mandate and he will certainly be the Democratic candidate, if health holds him up this year and a half. In the mid-term vote, last November, the Democrats defended themselves better than expected in a round that generally penalizes the president's party. AND it is not said that Trump is the challenger, even though he ran in early January in time to appear as a candidate before the judiciary, in New York and elsewhere.
Republicans looking for an alternative candidate to Trump
The party leadership does not like him, even if the parliamentary groups, especially in the Chamber, do not want to alienate his supporters. “He proved to be a loser,” says former Republican Speaker of the House, Paul D. Rayan. Some influential senators support him. Most are silent. While discrete polls conducted among the 168 members of the Republican National Committee, meeting three months ago in California, according to the New York Times which 120 to 140 would lean towards a different candidate by Trump, a surprising result, if confirmed, given that many were appointed in the Trump era.
This different candidate will not emerge soon, see the caution of the governor of Florida Ron DeSantis, because it is known that it was the plethora of Republican candidates in the 2016 primaries that brought out Trump with a bloc of about a quarter of the vote which, however, outclassed any consensus reached by the others. The party is looking for a credible candidate, capable of not alienating the populist vote, but also capable of ensuring a better style of government. And even younger, to better play the Biden age card. If then Trump were to opt for an autonomous candidacy, fearing not getting the nomination and thus taking away a few million votes from the party, he will be the one to guarantee Biden's reappointment. He is well capable of doing it, with his inordinate ego, to demonstrate how many millions are ready to follow him to hell.
If this is the case, the elderly current president will have to oversee, already now and even more so in his second term, a delicate economic diplomacy operation which goes to the heart of the new global geopolitical balances, which fully involves Europe, and which cannot ignore the third countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, if one does not want to give them more than what has already happened to the spheres of Russia and, much more than China. Between 1944 and the early 50s, Washington created, with the help that was not always obvious (there were also rivalries of various kinds) from Great Britain and France, a system of international rules best exemplified by the Monetary Fund, which held up well into the early 70s, and in a less crucial role still holds today. The model, simplifying a lot, was that ofexpansion of capitalism hand in hand with the expansion of democracy. The Soviet bloc followed a similar and opposite strategy in the name of communism. Globalization, which has also brought many benefits especially to underdeveloped countries, was supposed to be the definitive victory of the Western system after 1989. It was far too much so, in some respects, while for others it proved to be ungovernable in the end by Washington and by any other capital, and above all it has produced with the Chinese model a rival that is too strong for everyone and which embodies the non-coincidence between economic development and democracy, thus denying the same philosophy of Americanization and Westernization of the world.
Biden's two key laws
The Biden government passed two very important laws months ago which seek to protect America from this "new world" but which risk doing serious damage if they do not become a common project. The two laws are the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act, inflation has little to do with it, it is an industrial strategy in particular for electric cars, pharmaceuticals and more) and the CHIPS and Science for semiconductors and research, both dated August 2022, and which set in motion about 1500 trillion dollars, two-thirds the first and roughly one-third the second law.
"The problem" they write now on Foreign Affairs two experts who were part of the Biden government's economic diplomacy in 2021-2022, "is whether this new industrial policy will kick off a new race for subsidies to the detriment of friendly and allied countries or can instead be applied in cooperation with them, drawing on the lesson of global minimum tax”, that is the negotiation conducted by the Biden government and successfully concluded in October 21, with the adhesion of 140 countries, and which sets a minimum tax of 15% on the profits of multinationals, wherever they are made, to prevent itinerant accounting in search of tax haven. The article is titled The Perils of the New Industrial Policy, and concludes by hoping for a similar solution "with friendly and allied countries to address the problem of locating industries considered crucial for national security and the protection of the planet". Not just an American answer, but one multinational response to Chinese strategy of technological and geopolitical supremacy. Trump, like Putin, doesn't even want to talk to the European Union, for him a non-entity, like for Putin. All we have left is Biden.
