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NATO and USA vs. Russia and China

The coronavirus pandemic is going to last. Eleven billion reagents are missing to vaccinate those infected and try to control the plague. From the end of 2019 to date, the evil has killed more than 3.7 million people. The world cannot stop. Diplomacy is mobilizing again. After almost two years without meeting, the G-7 heads of state and government: Germany, Canada, the United States of America, France, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom of Great Britain, once again sat around a table round after being greeted by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the Cornish seaside town, southwest England. Apart from the members of the group – the seven richest countries in the world – Australia, South Korea, India and South Africa were invited to the summit, as a complement to counteract the rise of China. On this occasion, US President Joe Biden, on his first international trip as Uncle Sam’s representative, tries to mark the “return” of the American Union to multilateralism, after the isolationist period of his predecessor, Donald Trump.

Like it or not, Biden’s presence in the English town is a strong attempt by the US with its European allies that collided with the rudeness of the former White House resident in Washington. That is why the 46th. The US president traveled to the UK since Thursday, June 10, the day he signed a new Atlantic Charter with Prime Minister Johnson. After the G-7 meeting, he would go to Brussels for a meeting with NATO and on Tuesday 15 to a summit with the European Union (EU). On Wednesday 16 he would travel to Geneva, Switzerland, to meet with the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, in a meeting preceded by verbal disputes between the two leaders that make relations between Washington and Moscow very heated, to say the least. Biden called Putin a “murderer.” Nothing more, nothing less.

It is clear that Biden uses another type of diplomacy very different from that of the tycoon who secretly pulls the strings of his sympathizers to make life difficult for his successor. The first meeting between President Biden and Prime Minister Johnson served, officially, to reaffirm the historical relationship that has always existed between the United States and the United Kingdom, so in their fist touch – fashion imposed by the pandemic – they kept the forms and were cordial.

The Atlantic Charter, recently signed by the disheveled Boris and the senecto Joe, is a modern version of the pact between the phlegmatic Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill and the stoic Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941, exactly eight decades ago, with a focus on current challenges, from great purposes such as promoting democracy on the planet, defending their shared values ​​or fighting future pandemics together to more practical objectives such as trying to resume flights and tourist exchanges as soon as possible after COVID-19. Incidentally, the British premier remarked: “Churchill and Roosevelt faced the challenge of lifting the world after a devastating war. Today we face a different challenge, but just as challenging, how to reconstruct in the best possible way all the damage caused by the pandemic ”.

Apart from disagreements on very sensitive issues, such as the risk that Downing Street risks the Northern Ireland peace process on the occasion of Brexit, a matter that the center-right London newspaper The Times explained in great detail, recounting the unusual Diplomatic “reprimand” from the White House to the Johnson government, Biden’s visit to British territory moved on solid ground, without major confrontations as a possible free trade agreement between the ancient island and the last great power is also in process. After the tête à tête of the two leaders, the British limited himself to telling the historic BBC that there was “total harmony” on the need to solve trade problems in Northern Ireland and that London, Washington and Brussels – headquarters of the European Union—, they wanted to protect the Good Friday Agreement that it sealed in 1998. One of the keys to that pact was that there was no hard border between the two Ireland, an extremely complicated challenge now with Brexit. For the case, Johnson – who boasted of his friendship with Donald Trump as the president of Mexico has done -, in his role as host at the G-7 summit, took the opportunity to show that despite leaving the EU , The United Kingdom continues to be a key player in this dispute.

During the meeting in the Carbis Bay resort, the G-7 leaders agreed to continue supporting their respective economies with fiscal stimuli – unlike what has happened in the Q4 regime. Support for more stimulus was unanimous, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has customarily opposed increased public borrowing to stimulate growth, a position that was relaxed in Berlin as the COVID-19 pandemic worsened. In this regard, the Joe Biden administration pressured its allies to continue spending, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in an earlier meeting with her European colleagues encouraged them to “go big.” The G-7 leaders believe that an increase in inflation after social confinement (due to the death of the pandemic) would be temporary.

Most of the G-7 summits go unnoticed. On this occasion, perhaps because the pandemic changed the social scenario of almost all the countries of the world, it is possible that it will pass to posterity because the world is also different. And a lot. On this occasion, they not only tried to find solutions to major problems such as vaccination or climate change, but they also tried to guarantee their ability to influence. At the opening, the British premier urged his peers to “rebuild the world for the better” while recovering from what “has perhaps been the worst pandemic in history.” Therefore, he stressed that he had to learn from the “mistakes” of the 2008 financial crisis and address the “scar” of inequality. In this way, the G-7 (which represents 10% of the Earth’s population, but 45% of the wealth), pledged to allocate a billion doses of vaccines to the poorest countries in the world, a full part of a plan to “vaccinate the world” by the end of 2022. The pledge is not only about saving human beings, but is trying to counter “vaccine diplomacy” by China and Russia, which rushed to deliver their doses to countries with problems to acquire them. The United Kingdom (where 77% of the adult population has already received the first dose of the vaccine and 53% 40 with the complete schedule) will donate 100 million surplus doses in the next 12 months. USA, 500 million doses of BioNTech / Pfizer (200 million in the remainder of the year and the rest in the first half of 2022). In turn, the European Union has promised 100 million doses for African countries and other developing nations before the end of 2021.

The promises seem generous, but in reality they are far from the true needs. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that to vaccinate 70% of the world’s population, 10 billion vaccines are needed. In addition to the health crisis, the economic recovery is present. With the recipe for fiscal expansionism for which all the G-7 governments have voted affirmatively, London intends to erase Trump’s protectionist heritage at a stroke and bet on free trade as the best way to reactivate the world economy.

In this sense, the signs of overheating in the economy are accumulating. On Friday, June 11, it was announced that interannual inflation in the US stood at 5% in May, the highest figure since August 2008. Therefore, the industrialized powers must endorse the agreement that their finance ministers reached two weeks ago to reform the global system of taxation to large multinationals without exceptions, such as those that the UK seeks for its financial giants, ruin the project.

After living in Great Britain with the leaders of the G-7, and with the elderly queen of the UK, the nonagenarian Elizabeth II, who just turned 95 years old (throughout her long reign she has lived with 13 US presidents , from Harry Truman to Biden), which has already received the invitation from Joe Biden to visit him in the White House, in addition to extending the same courtesy to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany (even before Boris Johnson), Trump’s successor se He traveled to Brussels to attend the meeting of the 29 countries that make up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Was necessary. The experienced US president shelves the anti-diplomat era Trump. Biden tries to show that the balances established since World War II are still in force and that the military might of the American Union will not leave its European allies to fate. “If things turn out badly, I want all of Europe to know that the US is back,” said the 46th president of the USA, after guaranteeing that for his administration the collective clause of defense of the Atlantic Alliance by which an attack on a state membership is an attack on everyone – article 5 – is a “sacred obligation”. Principle that the “tycoon” tried to nullify, in retaliation for the low defense budget of the Europeans.

With this his first international tour, Biden reaffirms the American leadership after the pandemic before an uncertain world board in which it is not only a question of recovering the fundamentals that have defined the world in recent years but also of reinventing them. For this reason, NATO approved a document to redefine its strategy for 2030 in which new threats and new ways to combat them are contemplated, although the concerns remain many.

I don’t know if Biden is a good chess player, the fact is that on his maiden tour of Europe, he achieved a diplomatic victory as a chess champion. This does not mean that NATO starts a new Cold War with China. Instead, it will seek to create a united front in the face of international security challenges posed by China’s military escalation and its expansion of power on the planet. The NATO Secretary General, the Norwegian economist and politician, Jens Stoltenberg, at the beginning of the meeting said: “China is not our adversary, our enemy, but we have to address as an alliance the challenges that China poses for our security” .

Biden, for his part, accused: “Russia and China are seeking to drive a wedge in our transatlantic solidarity” … “Allies, we must face together the new challenges posed by them” … “We have Russia, which behaves differently than we expected and we have China ”. In reference to Western efforts since the mid-1990s to make these countries part of liberal democracies.

Anyway, from Brussels, Joe Biden declared that in his meeting with Putin – on Wednesday, June 16 -, he will not seek a conflict, but he will respond if Russia continues with its “harmful activities”, and that he will ask the Russian leader what they are. the “red lines” that you should not cross. OKAY.

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