Gone are the 80s and 90s of the last century in which neoliberalism, globalization, and the unipolar world led by the United States routed the planet down unforeseen paths, while academia debated whether China's "modernization" was synonymous with " Americanization, "if really its" opening "was only to open its doors to the United States, to its market and consumerist philosophy and to the acceptance of the imposition of" Western democracy "... or if the opposite was actually happening. Also far behind were those of the end of the USSR, the shock therapy, privatization, and widespread corruption of the Yeltsin years, which led Russia to the collapse at the end of the century and its resurgence.
Those were the same years in which changes took place - also driven by neoliberalism - with the temporary strengthening of global capitalism, which in the first years of the new century exhibited the best performance in its history - if only figures were considered - with the lowest levels inflation since the 1960s, with declining poverty and the rise of the middle class.
And it all happened because the single, neoliberal thought, that of the "end of history" according to Fukuyama, had deregulated economies on a global scale, privatized large state and parastatal companies, dismantled labor protection systems, ruining local competitors, promoting asymmetric integration blocs and establishing the era of financialization of the economy and speculative operations carried out on a planetary scale ... which had made it possible for the world economy to become even more dependent on the North American and allowed the United States to maintain and still increase your wealth on the basis of spending, dependence and your indebtedness to the rest of the world.
But all of the above led to the crisis of 2007-2008 - the beginning of the end of the "end of history" that began with the collapse of the real estate market - not only in the US but also in Europe - that dragged the parastatal giants, the banking crisis, the stock market crisis and the "solution" found to the disaster: the injection by central banks of tens of billions of dollars to increase liquidity, the lowering of interest rates, the tax refund, tax breaks and other actions of the same tenor.
The "solutions" found then further promoted the process of financialization of the economy and the globalizing geostrategy conceived to respond to the interests of the dominant plutocracy (1%, 0.01%, 0.001% ...? ) made it increasingly transnational; The nation-states in charge of executing such a strategy, increasingly at the service of the large transnational corporations, not only did not contribute to solving the existing problems, to stabilize the markets, to increase their efficiency, to solve the problems of poverty, inequality, unemployment. Of global warming, they exacerbated the contradictions of the system, particularly those of the United States, by accelerating the displacement of the global geopolitical axis towards the Asia-Pacific region.
And to avoid the above, came Trumpism, which in its slogans of "America first" and "Make America great again," implicitly recognized the decline of the superpower and the unattainable of the "American dream" for its citizens. . Only that Trumpism, instead of solving, exacerbated the existing problems, deepened the division of the country and made clear the loss of its global leadership, which was manifested in the continuous aggressions, the arrogant and contemptuous treatment of its allies, the interference in its internal affairs and the disrespect of agreements, conventions, and rules of International Law.
And because bailouts and "solutions" were required again, Joe Biden became president of the United States after announcing that his highest priority would be to regain the leadership of the world (it is not necessary to go back to the lesson of "democracy" offered by the northern nation, including the assault on the Capitol).
Knowing the priority, it was not surprising that, as the president's first foreign policy initiative, in the conditions of neoliberal post-globalization capitalism, in a pandemic and with the accelerated decline of the former hegemon, it was presented by the US-NATO at the meeting of the G -7, the "Rebuild Better for the World" initiative, with the explicit aim of countering the Chinese economic development project One Belt, One Road.
Nor was it strange, in the US initiative, to appreciate that in it - supposedly aimed at improving the infrastructure of "middle and low income" countries - clearly there was the idea reiterated by its president to "lead the world again." and, in the very idea, the geopolitical conception of the exceptionality of the United States and its manifest destiny is implicit, which does not even question whether that destiny is advantageous today for European countries and Japan, as they submit to a geopolitical order governed by an unreliable partner that balances between Trumpist nationalism (with or without Trump) and the limited and protectionist globalization contained in the Buy American promoted by Biden; Nor is it convenient for the West to isolate itself from the banker (as Hillary Clinton called China) and from a market of more than 1.4 billion people, considered today the engine of the world economy.
The point is that the leaders of the G-7 countries cannot ignore that the United States today is very far from the position it occupied in the days of unipolarity. The data place it in position 28 on the social progress index that measures health, safety, and well-being worldwide, to be one of the only three countries, out of 163, that fell back in well-being during the last decade; Also, in the World Competitiveness Yearbook, the World Bank ranked it 35th out of 174 countries.
The foregoing sufficiently explains the need for the plans to restore the American potential: American Rescue Plan, American Employment Plan, and Family Plan announced by President Biden, for an amount of more than 6.5 million dollars, which were due to be executed with products sourced from the world and financed through indebtedness, as can be seen on the White House website: "Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing, and Fostering Broad-Based Growth," and partly through increasing the tax burden on the richest. All plans have already had to be reduced and postponed (include here the increase in the hourly wage rate promised by Biden) because they did not have enough support from the Republican elite.
The G-7 meeting was completed with the NATO Summit (30 countries) in which, of course, together with Biden's assertion that the US was back and the consensus on the need to increase the joint financing of military operations, there were no qualms about considering Russia as "the main enemy," on which the secretary-general of the organization, Jens Stoltenberg, pointed out that relations were at their lowest point since the Cold War, and that he posed a threat to the security of the alliance.
According to Stoltenberg, China also became the protagonist of the meeting because the Asian nation “is rapidly expanding its arsenal with more nuclear warheads and a greater number of sophisticated launch systems. It is opaque on military modernization, (and) cooperating with Russia, including exercises in the Euro-Atlantic area. '
And although there are no surprises in the coincidence between what was reported from the NATO meeting, with the White House Communiqué of June 13, Revitalizing the transatlantic alliance, nor with Biden's call on “the increase of the global power of Beijing as it constitutes a security challenge that is trying to undermine the global rules-based system,” the continuous provocations of NATO do set off alarms, which after the meeting have increased and have led the world to a second and even more dangerous Cold War.
By; Jorge Casals Llano, Granma Newspaper, 08/19/21
