USA is Working to Reduce Global Integration

I think it has accelerated a fragmentation dynamic that has been going on for some time now. Globalization has been contested for at least a decade. The processes of global integration and the institutions that have accompanied these processes for half a century or more are being contested, and we see this even in our democracies. This war has accelerated fragmentation, resulting in tightening the Atlantic alliance led by the United States, as well as in a reaction from the non-Euro-American third world in the form of neutrality, distancing, and in many cases open hostility. Before the summit meeting with Xi Jinping, President Lula announced Brazil’s readiness to avoid the dollar dominance in commercial transactions. I think it’s a process of global fragmentation that perhaps is being recreated through blocs, but primarily around a non-bipolar conflict with a power clash between China and the United States, which is especially problematic. In addition, I believe that in these blocs, the United States hopes to deepen regional integration, for example, with Europe, at the level of security and economics, in order to reduce global integration. We are working on regional integration for de-globalization because it has mostly benefited China by gaining support in Washington DC, giving it the conditioning power that needs to be taken away from it.

I believe so, because it reinforces the dynamic of competition and antagonism and makes cooperation difficult. Unlike the Cold War, the US and China, in turn, are deeply integrated. Globalization has developed in many directions, but the Chinese-American direction has been one of the most important, and sometimes the most important. Just think of US companies that relocate, outsource, and shift production to China, or China that finances the US debt, or the American market that reimports much of this production with a frightening trade deficit. These are dimensions that remain but are challenged today, and I believe this generates tension, because China has been entangled in problematic authoritarian and nationalist involution for a decade and, consequently, fuels this competition. China is being especially successfully blamed in the USA today. In such an inflamed nationalist democracy like America’s, it becomes difficult to take sober and responsible political positions. The balloon incident developed hysterically, and there was nothing the Biden administration could do but tear it down and suspend Blinken’s visit. This grotesque incident was created to show that in another climate, this might have been settled by two phone calls between two junior Foreign Ministry officials.

Ukraine has reassembled the transatlantic bloc where the United States has reasserted its leadership and is using this war to reconcile the transatlantic bloc, which turned out to be very imperfect. I believe that US soft power retains some elements. It remains a viable country. Answering your question, I think they have lost their appeal for two reasons: American democracy has not really shown itself in recent years, with an inadequate figure like Trump and an attempted coup d’état, a highly torn and polarized democracy; along with this suffering democracy, the US is a country that for the past 30 years continues to practice double standards, in which what is true for themselves does not apply to others and vice versa. Support for Ukraine, which I consider necessary, was justified from the standpoint of protecting national sovereignty and respecting international law. However, if we look at these categories in 2003 Iraq, the US has often polluted these principles. The Biden Inflation Reduction Act almost certainly violates numerous provisions of the World Trade Organization. The application of these double standards is another reason for the weakening of the attractiveness, the myth of the United States.

This may be on a regional scale or in relation to some determinants of power. If we look at nuclear weapons, they give a deterrent to whoever owns them, and we have a bipolar structure in the sense that Russia and the USA are two independent nations in terms of missile power and number of warheads, but there are also others, such as France, China… and perhaps on a regional scale, Japan will rearm and become a central power less dependent on the US. I believe that today’s picture is bipolar, repeating the cold war patterns, centered around competition between China and the US. In the first cold war, it was a very asymmetrical false bipolarity, as the US remains superior, not like 30 years ago, but they still outperform the alliance network in terms of military power and global projection ability of the nation. They have between 100 and 800 military bases around the world, depending on the numbers, and they can deploy them immediately, which China cannot. Even the hegemony of the dollar, albeit contested, remains. The US still has interests in maintaining good relations with China; for example, Apple would collapse without a supply chain in China. But these are interests that are politically hushed up. In 2002, an American spy plane flew over southern China and crashed a Chinese military aircraft. The Chinese pilot died, and the plane was forced to make an emergency landing and was arrested along with the crew. In those two weeks of diplomatic crisis, let’s say, the adults in the room, those who wanted good relations with China, instantly took the reins of the situation, and the crisis ended right away, demonstrating that there are many economic and political interests in America that need to be preserved. China is good. These interests still exist today, but they are much weaker and less capable of influencing political choice and public debate.