Late on Tuesday, October 17, Joe Biden boarded Air Force One and headed toward Israel, with the aim of trying to contain the effects of the Gaza war and prevent its spread to the entire region. At the very moment of climbing the plane stairs he already knew that his politically risky trip was going to be a failure. Shortly before leaving, the King of Jordan, Abdullah II, had canceled the summit that was to bring him together the next day with the president of the United States and the leaders of Egypt, Abdul Fatah al Sisi, and the Palestinian Authority, Mahmud Abbas, to discuss the Gaza crisis. With the summit aborted, Biden's trip had only one destination: Tel Aviv.
The cancellation of the meeting was justified by the Jordanian monarch due to the bombing of the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza, of which Israel was accused and in which hundreds of people supposedly died. Ultimately, the reason doesn't matter. The diplomatic snub was huge. The slam of the door revealed the lack of authority of Washington, whose hegemony is increasingly contested, and definitively ruined Biden's attempt to show an apparent balance in the conflict.
During the seven hours he spent in the Holy Land, Biden expressed solidarity with the Jewish people over the Hamas terrorist attack and reiterated the strong US commitment to Israel's security. And all he could extract from Israeli Prime Minister Beniamin Netanyahu was the creation of humanitarian corridors to facilitate the southern evacuation of the Palestinian civilian population fleeing the bombings in northern Gaza and open the way for aid. humanitarian.
Biden urged his interlocutor not to get carried away by rage and to learn from the mistakes of the United States after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 (let us remember: the war launched in retaliation against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan lasted twenty years , caused tens of thousands of deaths and ended with the American withdrawal and the return of the Islamists to power as if nothing had happened). But it was clear that he was not going to listen to him. Israel has decided to launch a military invasion of Gaza that has every sign of ending up mired in the same quagmire as Afghanistan, and the warnings of almost all analysts are of no use.
The alignment of the US and Europe with Israel – with all the nuances that have been introduced in Washington and Brussels regarding respect for civilians – has aroused incomprehension and rejection from Arab countries, which accuse the US. and its allies to treat Israelis and Palestinians with double standards. And it has opened a new crack in the fracture that separates Western countries from the rest of the world and, particularly, from the so-called Global South. The world has not followed the Westerners in their confrontation with Vladimir Putin's Russia over the invasion of Ukraine (didn't the Americans do the same in Iraq in 2003?) nor in the economic and diplomatic struggle they maintain with China. by Xi Jinping. Nor are they going to do it now in defense of Israel.
The anti-French sentiment that has been spreading recently in some countries in central and western Africa has been analyzed preferably as a consequence of France's neocolonialist policy, but perhaps it also responds to the same global context. The West is alone. Lonelier than one. And maybe you should ask yourself why.
A word has begun to be commonly used among specialists to explain this disaffection: resentment. French political scientist Michel Duclos attributes this to Western arbitrariness when deciding who, and under what circumstances, has the right to resort to force in international relations. The law of the funnel...
For Mark Suzman, CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, this resentment has its roots in the failure of developed countries to meet their commitments regarding the global distribution of Covid vaccines, as well as aid to mitigate the risks. effects of climate change. In an article published in Foreign Affairs in early September, Suzman cited a statement by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the New Global Financing Pact summit in Paris last June: “Countries in the Northern Hemisphere were hoarding them (vaccines). ) and they did not want to release them at the time when we needed them most. That generated disappointment and resentment in us, because we felt as if life in the Northern Hemisphere was much more important than life in the Global South.”
As Israeli bombs fall on Gaza, Russia and China try to obtain the maximum benefit from the new situation, which weakens the American position in the world. For Putin in particular, the crisis offers an unexpected respite: the war in Ukraine has practically disappeared from the media and political radar.
In any case, what former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin calls “Westernism” – that is, the idea that the West sets the tone and others follow – may be considered outdated.
