2023-07-22 06:00:00
If you have the feeling that everything seems to be going badly for some time with the war in Ukraine dragging on, the intense heat spreading and prolonging and the downturn that democracy is undergoing here and there, some see even worse on the horizon.
The Aspen Security Forum ended yesterday in Colorado. It’s a big annual meeting of leaders, business people and thinkers – young and old – who talk broadly about threats to world peace.
On site, my colleagues from the online media POLITICO noted that as talkative as the speakers could be, it proved impossible to get them to talk about Donald Trump and what his return to the White House could mean for the rest of the planet. It is indeed enough to cause nightmares.
WHAT WE ADMIT IN PRIVATE
POLITICO says some are quietly expressing apprehension about a Trump comeback, “chaos being,” a former member of his administration anonymously confessed, “a very difficult way to govern.”
First, of course, is what would become of US support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. The ex-president claims that he could put an end to it in twenty-four hours. A crazy assertion in such a savage and complex conflict, but to which John Bolton, his former national security adviser, responded with the most bite last May on the airwaves of CNN.
“No rational person believes that Ukrainians and Russians can be brought to an agreement on how to resolve the conflict in twenty-four hours. Trump feels that foreign leaders, especially his opponents, hold him in high esteem, that he has good relations with Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un. In fact, the opposite is true. I was in those rooms with him when he met those leaders. I think they all think he’s a laughable jerk.”
A COSTLY SUCCESS
In foreign policy, Donald Trump boasts of not having started new wars. A success indeed after the Afghan and Iraqi quagmires into which George W. Bush and Barack Obama sank.
With the same impetus, however, he ensured that latent conflicts did not find a solution. The famous Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between Israel and four Arab countries, were concluded with complete disinterest in the fate of the Palestinians, from whom it withdrew 200 million dollars in humanitarian aid.
Canceling the deal on Iran’s nuclear program proved a spectacular failure, with Tehran resuming uranium enrichment rather than making any concessions.
His “love letters” and meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un led to nothing but the continuation of Pyongyang’s ballistic missile program, as commercial pressures placed on China began the move away from the two biggest economic powers.
It is far from excluded that Trump wins the next presidential election and recreates in the White House the tumult of his first four years. In the meantime, as participants at the Aspen Forum acknowledged, let’s appreciate the normality and predictability that Joe Biden has brought back to the Oval Office for two and a half years.
AFP and Adobe Stock photos
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