Geopolitics, US Elections ... What's Next.

Many people are truly concerned in the world today, conjecture, speculate, and write on the upcoming elections in the United States. It would be a mistake for us Cubans to stop studying and trying to foresee its possible impacts on the future of the world and our country. Only like that we can prepare for the clash of the dramatic moments that loom ahead.

We have plenty of experience in regard with the northern neighbor and the necessary monitoring, for this reason, of its history, which provides us with elements that perhaps others do not know or, knowing them, choose to ignore. Among them appears the false concept of "Americanism" which as a myth began to develop even before the emergence of the United States as a nation. This concept was well exposed by Jorge Hernández in his book "Americanism: National Identity and Domestic Legitimacy" which quoted: "The role of Messiah, the expansionist vocation, the belief of being a chosen people, the puritan fundamentalism, the protestant ethics, the manifest destiny ... the myth about equal opportunities, the certainty in the role of the market and competition as regulators of all social relationships…”

As a reminder, a brief reference to the undemocratic US electoral system - and the misconception of its entire democracy - despite the fact that, unfortunately, that country has a disproportionate influence, if we take into consideration its population, on the rest of humanity. All, or almost all of us (the illiterate, the ignorant, the innocent, the misinformed, the deceived and even the indolent must be left out) know how negative it is – even elections themselves - which ranges from the way candidates are selected, on election day, how they are organized and even how the participation of the less wealthy people is conditioned and excluded, without giving importance to the billions of dollars that candidates invest in their campaigns, which creates commitments that must be paid when they are elected. These are the “democratic” rules of the game accepted (electoral vote included), no matter how everyone knows, they are part of the electoral carnival.

But the elections next November 3^rd, 2020 will be very different, unique, not just because of the candidates, but because of what will be voted (although voters do not know). It’s that it will be chosen among candidates who represent the majority of “Democrats”, with its donkey and blue color or the “Republicans”, with their elephant and red color, just like any regular North American elections, since ever.

But what lies behind "the shape of things", "the seemingly " and the fog of politics? We will try to get to "the real", to what’s "unseen".

As Ionut Popescu well explains in the article: A Middle Path? US Public Opinion and Grand Strategy, published in March 2019, there are two currents of thought living today in the elite of North American society: those who advocate to keep "global leadership" (globalists) and those who do it for " Restraint” (restrictionists, actually isolationists). The former (exposed by academics like William Wohlforth, Stephen Brooks, John Ikenberry, Hal Brands, and Peter Feaver ...) argue that US "Global Leadership" remains the correct strategic framework that should continue to drive US foreign policy; the latter (John Mearsheimer, Barry Posen, Stephen Walt, Christopher Layne, Eugene Gholz ...) assume that the United States must significantly decrease its security commitments and alliances around the world together with its participation in international organizations and institutions, which would reduce the military and all kinds of expenses abroad to focus on “national defense”. According to this second point of view, the expenses sustained in the last decades to keep the North American leadership far exceed the benefits obtained therefore considering necessary the Restriction (Moderation?).

It’s known that among Republicans, besides those who don’t support Trump's leadership or Trumpism, there are also those who consider nationalism and populism incompatible with conservatism, and still economic conservatives who reject protectionism as a political guideline. They are so many and so powerful that they publish their opinions on Fox News, the most conservative and Trump-following media in the United States. Among them appear characters like Sarah Longwell who together with Bill Kristoll (son of Irving Kristoll, considered the father of neoconservatism) created the organization. " Defend democracy together "and from it criticize both the actions they consider outside the law of the president, like his disastrous leadership of the country during the pandemic.

Let’s include in the prior list the rejection of other Republican personalities like the former President Bush, son, Senator Mit Romney and even his former collaborators Bannon, Bolton, Mattis, Esper ...

It’s clear that Trump only represents a part of the establishment, which intends to keep - from isolationism and appealing to his until recently undisputed economic, scientific, military and communicational superiority - an empire that since before the pandemic showed clear symptoms of decline, which accelerated his performance as president, so much that he has even shattered the "global order" that thereby increasing the distance from his traditional partners, aggressiveness and even acts that violate international law, including genocidal in times of pandemic against Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. Neither the last of its "merits", dragging the country to the brink of civil war, can please the establishment.

On the other "ballot", representing "globalists", a typical representative of the plutocratic "establishment", Joe Biden (another lousy representative, too gray, too old, so much so that he sees himself as a "transition candidate", "bridge” towards a new generation of leaders, who are still looking for a Vice-Presidential candidate: a woman, black and capable of succeeding him). But this "globalist" must (as an instrument of big capital, globalized, financialized and transnationalized) put the government at the service of a globalization of capital, now "exclusive" for which, taking into account the global geopolitical situation, it needs first to try to realign the following states of "the West" by renouncing, at least formally, the "America first" (not just Trump, and even if he does not proclaim it).

Behind both candidates, on one side, the industrial military complex, the large banks, the oil and gas companies, the deteriorated and uncompetitive national industry ... and a working class in the industry and "farmers" in agriculture (here with broad participation of immigrant workers who are overexploited and rejected) fundamentally “wasp” (white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant who paradoxically votes for a Jew) and still thinks, due to their ignorance, that the irrecoverable “American dream” and its former high levels of "middle class" income, when their country today is undoubtedly the poorest among the wealthy countries, as the pandemic has shown.

And also behind both candidates the large Transnational Corporations (TNCs) in whose realms "sun never sets down" (now if rigorous and accurate) that they manufacture in the world, and also in China, what they sell in the world, and also in the U.S., and that without globalization and with borders for capital restored, their profits would greatly decrease, just as an example: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Berkshire, Facebook ..., just the first of most of the 500 that appear with based in the U.S.

And also behind both sides, as an unexpected result of the globalization of capitalism, the consensus in the establishment on the need to contain socialism in China due to the global geopolitical challenge that it represents, and for the same reason also to capitalism in Russia, with its renewed and ultramodern military power and its alliance with China, all in the conditions of a weakened empire and therefore the uncertainty on the inevitability of succeeding or, at best, the possibility of achieving a "pyrrhic victory", as more probable results of the started "cold war", more geopolitical and technological than commercial.

Two countries, China and Russia, ready to share the global primacy, another, India, preparing for it, the European Union ready to take its rightful place, the middle powers ready to defend their interests and the rest of the countries fighting to achieve the standards of living they deserve is the world with which the American president, who will take office on January 20^th, 2021, will have to deal with when everyone, (again almost all, because now it would also be necessary to exclude the selfish and interested) are aware that humanity faces global problems that can only be solved globally, with an inclusive and non-exclusive globalization.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff