COMMENTARY / Rafael Calduch Torres*.
As tradition dictates since 1845, on the first Tuesday of November, the 3rd, the voting inhabitants of the fifty states that make up the United States will take part in the fifty-ninth Election Day, the day on which the high school Electoral, which will have to choose between keeping the forty-fifth President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, or choosing the forty-sixth, Joe Biden.
But the real problem facing not only the inhabitants of the United States, but the rest of the world's population is that both Trump and Biden are proposing their international strategy at core topic domestically, following in the wake of the change that took place in the country after the 9/11 attacks and whose fundamental result has been the absence of effective leadership of the American superpower in the last twenty years. Because if there is one thing that must be clear to us, it is the fact that none of the candidates, as their predecessors did not, has a plan that would allow them to resume the international leadership that the United States enjoyed until the end of the 1990s; On the contrary, what urges them is to solve domestic problems and subordinate international issues, which a superpower of the stature of the United States must face, to the solutions adopted internally, which is one of the serious strategic errors of our era, since strong international leaderships that are coherent with the management of domestic problems have historically allowed the creation of points of meeting in American society that cushion divisions and bring cohesion to the country.
However, despite these general similarities there is a clear difference between the two candidates when it comes to addressing international issues that will affect the results of the choice Americans will make on Tuesday.
"The Power of America's example". With this slogan, Biden's general proposal , much clearer and more accessible than Trump's, develops a plan to lead the democratic world in the 21st century based on using the way in which American domestic problems will be solved as an example, binding and sustaining its international leadership; it goes without saying that the mere assumption that the internal problems of the United States are not exactly extrapolable to the rest of the international actors is not even taken into account.
Thus, the Democratic candidate , using a rather traditional rhetoric on the dignity of leadership, uses the connection between domestic and international reality to propose a program of national regeneration without specifying how this will restore the lost international leadership. This approach will be based on two main pillars: the democratic regeneration of the country and the reconstruction of the US class average which, in turn, will make it possible to underpin other international projects.
Democratic regeneration will be based on the reinforcement of the educational and judicial systems, transparency, the fight against corruption or the end of attacks on the media, and is proposed as an instrument for the reestablishment of the country's moral leadership which, in addition to inspiring others, would serve for the US to transfer these US national policies to the international arena, so that others may follow and imitate them through a sort of global league for democracy that seems very nebulous.
Meanwhile, the reconstruction of the class average , the same to which Trump appealed four years ago, would pass through greater investment in technological innovation and supposedly greater global equity with respect to international trade, from which the United States would benefit above all.
Finally, all of the above would be complemented by a new era in international arms control through a new START treaty between the US and Russia, US leadership in the fight against climate change, an end to interventions on foreign soil, particularly in Afghanistan, and the reestablishment of diplomacy as the backbone of US foreign policy.
"Promises Made, Promises Kept!What is Trump's alternative? The current President does not reveal what his projects are, but he does propose a review of his "achievements" which, we understand, will give us an idea of what his foreign policy will be, which will revolve around the continuity of the US trade rebalancing based, as up to now, on shielding US companies from foreign investment, the imposition of new tariffs, the fight against fraudulent trade practices, especially by China, and the restoration of US relations with its allies in Asia/Pacific, the Middle East and Europe, but without specific proposals.
With regard to the area of security, treated in a differentiated manner by Trump, the recipe is the increase in defense spending, the shielding of US territory against terrorism and opposition to North Korea, Venezuela and Iran, which will be joined by the maintenance and expansion of the recent campaign of actions directed specifically against Russia, with the goal declared to contain it in Ukraine and to prevent cyber-attacks.
But the reality is that both candidates will have to face global challenges that they have not considered in their programs and that will condition them decisively in their mandates, starting with the management of the pandemic and its economic effects on a global scale and including the growing competition from the European Union, especially as its common military and defense capabilities develop.
As we have just seen, none of the candidates will offer new solutions and therefore the situation is not likely to improve, at least in the short term.
* PhD in Contemporary History. graduate in Political Science and Administration. Professor at UNAV and UCJC.
