Renaud Girard: "In 2021, Joe Biden only extended Donald Trump's policy"

Figarovox.-What assessment can we draw from the beginnings of Joe Biden to the Presidency of the United States?Did he manage to establish himself as the head of a coalition of democracies, as he aspired?

Renaud Girard. - By sometimes putting more forms there, Joe Biden only prolongs the foreign policy of his predecessor, which is America First. Biden said he was doing a foreign policy for the American middle classes. It is a sentence that Donald Trump could very well have pronounced. In its foreign policy, America has decided to focus on its historic match with China. This is why, apart from the unwavering support for Israel, it no longer shows interest in the complicated Middle East. It shows even less interest for Africa, which it perceives, through a sort of intellectual fog, like a desperate continent, made of violence, dictatorships, civil wars, informal economies. On the other hand, the match with China is a match that the American middle classes include perfectly. With all its intelligence, all its forces, all its energy, its whole cunning, America will do everything to prevent China from delighting first place in the world podium in geopolitical, technological and financial spheres. China considers that Americans are intruders in Asia. She seeks to chase them. But the Americans are not ready to accept the prospect of such an ousting. At all costs, they want to keep a leader position in Asia-Pacific.

As for your second question, I do not believe that the populations of democratic countries see Joe Biden their great protector.They joined the lesson of his rushed departure from Afghanistan.They achieved his land indifference to the fate of Afghan women and that of Kabul pro-Western students.The French, on the other hand, feel more despised than protected by Biden, especially after the case of the Australian submarines - but this is marginal.What is certain, however, is that Joe Biden is building, in Asia-Pacific, a coalition of democracies against China.Its most important members are the United States, Japan, South Korea, India and Australia.

Is his foreign policy radically different from his predecessor?

It is not since it extends it.It is said that Trump was softer than him towards Russia.But it's wrong.Never so many new American sanctions have been created against Russia as under the Trump administration.

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The year 2021 was marked by the taking of Kabul by the Taliban, does this event symbolize the failure of the West?In what ?

To properly grasp the recent history of Afghanistan, it must be understood that there were two Western wars there and not a single one.The first, very short, started on October 7, 2001 against the Taliban regime after he refused to give bin Laden to the Americans.This war ended in November 2001, with the fall of Kabul to the hands of the Northern Alliance forces, allies of America and funded by it.The American special forces then cleaned all the nests of internationalist Arab Islamist combatants.Taliban leaders went to take refuge in Pakistan.But America has neglected to demand Islamabad a complete purge of the Taliban movement.

Drunk of such a rapid and brilliant victory in major Afghan cities, the Americans then summoned an international conference on Afghanistan in Bonn.There, on December 5, 2001, they committed the sin of Hubris, the geopolitical excess already analyzed by the Greeks 2400 years ago.They announced that they were going to "rebuild, democratize, develop" Afghanistan.It was beautiful as the "civilizing mission of colonization" of Jules Ferry.Except that Westerners no longer have the moral, diplomatic, political and human means to accomplish such a mission.

The reconstruction of Afghanistan has been entrusted to NATO, which has established everywhere PRT (provincial reconstruction teams).But after four years, the Afghan peasants have had enough of the corruption of the Kabul government set up by Washington and they no longer supported to see arms foreigners patrolling it.Surfing on this dissatisfaction movement, the Taliban returned little by little.Westerners did not find the recipe to counter this movement;Then they lost patience;Then they left abruptly, abandoning their unpleasant site.The Afghan adventure signed the death of the neoconservative movement, which puts democracy above peace, to the point of believing that it can be imposed by force.

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You have denounced the hypocrisy of Europeans in the migration crisis on the Polish border.Why does the EU not manage to tell the world how many migrants is it willing to welcome?How to get out of the permanent blackmail of other states on the migratory issue?

The most crucial decision was that of Angela Merkel, August 31, 2015. That day, under the emotion, after the drowning of a boy on a Turkish coast, the Chancellor decided to open the big Borders of Germany to migrants, mostly from the Middle East. It is a historic decision that the German leader took alone, without consulting her Parliament, or her European partners. It has given an extremely strong signal to hundreds of millions of miserables, through Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa: if you manage to reach European territory, you will find accommodation, we will educate and we You will take care of your family for free, and you will receive an allowance representing ten times the amount of the salary you would receive at home by working. This is why so many young men embark on the adventure, despite its obvious dangers, and the important sums that must be gathered to pay the mafia networks of smugglers.

The EU does not say how many migrants it would be ready to welcome per year because its members do not agree on this issue.The countries of the Visegrad group (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia) are the most reluctant to receive non-European people from their homes.In 2015, they said publicly that they only wanted to take Christians among the refugees in crises in the Middle East.These are countries that consider that the assimilation of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe has not succeeded.Attached to their Christian traditions, they denounce what they call the rampant Islamization of Europe and they are not willing to participate.

In the other EU countries, the migratory question has never been entitled to a real democratic debate. The populations have never been consulted to find out whether or not they want to live in a multicultural society. Do we want a right of asylum limited to politically persecuted people at home for their defense of European values? Or do we want a right of asylum extended to all people living in countries knowing war, political dictatorship, misery? "We cannot welcome all the misery in the world," said Michel Rocard. But the question of how many additional extra-European foreigners French, German or Italian societies are ready to accept has never been democratically decided. Everything happens as if, in Western Europe, immigration was a taboo issue, on which one cannot debate in depth, on which it is difficult to decide, on which the rare decisions taken are not applied. As long as this vagueness persists, the neighboring countries of the EU will be able to continue their various migratory shouting, as did Turkey, Morocco or Belarus in recent years.

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At the end of the year, Putin deploys his troops on the Ukrainian border, is the hypothesis of an invasion credible?What is Russia looking for?

Putin does not intend to invade Ukraine. If he wanted to do so, he would have done so in May 2014, after 42 prorusian activists were burned alive in Odessa. He had a golden pretext and no one would have stopped him. But it is true that Russia is obsessed with the ever -finished extension of NATO to the east. It considers Ukraine as a march of its territory, a buffer state which cannot belong to an opposing military alliance. Putin requests security guarantees from the West. An American-Russian security dialogue is set up, which started with a long telephone conversation between Biden and Putin on December 30, 2021. I do not think that America is ready to bring Ukraine into NATO and to NATO and Give him the guarantee of military intervention provided for in article 5 of the North Atlantic Charter. America wants stable relations with the Russians, it has no intention of giving them war, it wants to focus on the Chinese dossier, and it counts on a kind of Russian neutrality in Indo-Pacific. As for Russia, I do not believe a second that it is ready to ally itself permanently and militarily with China. Geographically and historically, they are rival countries. But I find it sad to see this great European country, so close to us by its culture, always deprived of a rule of law. I regret seeing him turn to authoritarianism and curl up more and more on himself. I saw a very bad sign in the recent conviction inflicted on the remarkable Memorial association, which fights for a rehabilitation of the victims of Stalinism.

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In 2022, France will take the presidency of the EU council, what can we expect?After Angela Merkel's departure, can Macron finally become the head of Europe as he hopes?

There will never be a head of Europe.The last time the European space experienced only one chief, it was in 1942, when Berlin controlled the equivalent of the current EU territory, minus the Iberian Peninsula and Ireland.This chiefdom had started in the assault, she continued in crime, she ended in defeat and ruin.But there can be leadership in Europe.Schuman, de Gasperi, Adenauer, De Gaulle, Brandt, Mitterrand, Kohl, have shown.Macron also shown by his Sorbonne speech on September 26, 2017. But when he started behaving in chief and lecturing in Italy, and also to the countries of the Visegrad group, he was immediately rejected.He learned the lesson.This is the reason why he went to their summit in Budapest on December 13, 2021, in order to constructively prepare the French presidency of the EU.

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During these six months many files can progress if France shows the right leadership: the continuation of fiscal and budgetary harmonization; a European energy policy (in order to correct the catastrophic German nuclear abandonment decision); mediation between Iran and America; an empowerment of Europe in terms of armaments; a specific social and environmental VAT for imported products, especially Asia; a strengthening of the borders of Europe; An asylum policy reserved for refugees sharing European values, etc. No one knows today who will be President of the French Republic in May 2022. But diplomatic fundamentals will not change. If it wants to keep any influence in Europe, France will first have to put order in its public finances. France can only radiate by her example, never by the lessons it sometimes likes to inflict on other nations of the world.

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