From Trump to Biden: How America and Europe Are Changing

Joseph Preston Baratta
Professor of World History and International Relations at the Worcester State College, MA, USA

America has suffered a defeat in Afghanistan as great as that in Vietnam, but President Biden pushes on with his domestic agenda. He shrewdly divided his infrastructure bill into a $1 trillion traditional part (roads and bridges), which won enough Republican votes to pass in the Senate by simple majority, and a more contentious, progressive $3.5 trillion part (health care, child care, family leave, public education), which passed 51-50 by the parliamentary maneuver known as “reconciliation,” in which Vice-President Harris cast the tie-breaking vote as every Republican voted no. The new social safety net will be paid for by long overdue higher taxes on wealthy people and corporations.  There is much more to do to save democracy in America. The Green New Deal (real leadership to confront climate change) has been postponed.

The political situation in America is very ominous. If Biden is not able to pass and implement more of his legislative proposals designed to remedy the domestic crisis, the mid-term elections in 2022 will produce a “shellacking” by the Republicans, as in Obama's midterm. Biden could lose even his 9 vote majority in the House and also the 50-50 split in the Senate. Hence in 2024, we could have a worse fight with the Trump faction, aided by the current state electoral reforms designed to suppress the popular vote that naturally would favor the Democrats. The progressives will leave the Democratic party, and the fascists in the Republican party may stoop to force to remake the U.S. government in their image.

In foreign affairs, Biden promises mainly to get back to the achievements of the Obama administration – the Paris accords on climate change, the Iran deal.  The U.S. will rejoin the Conference of the Parties in Glasgow in late October, but with 191 parties things move very slowly.  The Iran deal could not be renegotiated before the conservative Ebrahim Raisi took office as president; he is sometimes mentioned as a successor to the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.  Biden has proposed a Summit for Democracy in December, but with U.S.-Russian relations so low that some see a new Cold War in progress, and U.S.-China relations on the verge of a global contest over democracy and autocracy, little may be expected than further division of the world.

What is happening is a visible decline of American global leadership.  This new historical fact, several decades in development since the end of the old Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, is the decline of American willingness and ability to lead in the building of a liberal, legal capitalist and democratic world order.  There is almost no prospect of the perfection of international institutions left over from the Second World War and the Cold War.  The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty seems definitely dead.  The Non-Proliferation Treaty is paralyzed at Article 6.  The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is practically irrelevant as decoys and MIRVs threaten to overwhelm any defense.  The formation of the new U.S. Space Force threatens to obviate the Outer Space Treaty designed to prevent war in space.  The Comprehensive Test Ban of 1996 is stuck as eight major nuclear powers refuse to join the 35 states (of 44 needed) to put the threat of nuclear war into the past.  The Open Skies Treaty is defunct.  The United Nations, reflecting great power alignments in 1945, seems beyond reform.  The Security Council will not permit amendment on its membership, nor will the General Assembly be allowed to permit a degree of popular representation.  The U.S. plans to rejoin the World Health Organization, but initiatives to strengthen it have come from France and Germany.  The U.S. does plan to rejoin the U.N. Council on Human Rights, if, without courts to defend individuals, that will make a difference.  The World Bank and International Monetary Fund are stuck in their old forms of weighted voting by capital contributions, and the World Trade Organization has abandoned its stuck Doha round of reforms.  NATO is alive, just barely, but the Partnership for Peace process (1994-2004) has not survived the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and the Baltic states.^[i]

Nothing could be more foolish than idle talk of a “new Cold War.”  Neither Russia nor China is openly belligerent, nor is the United States, which needs time to get its domestic house in order, but there is always danger of a 1914 event.  What would happen if China should sink a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Taiwan Strait with its Dong Feng hypersonic precision guided missile?  Or if Russia, feeling threatened by NATO, should reconquer the Baltic states, which the Russian army has boasted it could do in 60 hours?  Or if the U.S.A., responding to a new terrorist attack, should launch a nuclear missile from its new space platform?  Or if another U.S. president should use our vaunted military to shape small nations, for the same class of generals, officials, experts, and politicos who brought us the war in Afghanistan are still in power.

We in America and Europe need to find a way to deflect current tensions.  The place to start, in my opinion, is Russia.  It is useful to challenge hardened feelings about Russia if only to practice the new kind of interdependent statesmanship we need on many global problems.  Germany has a new chancellor and France will have a new president in 2022.  These states will be the ones to exercise new diplomatic leadership particularly toward Russia.  It is not for us in the federalist movements to find the right initiatives, but we can help to form a supportive public opinion behind enlightened national leadership.  As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without public sentiment nothing can succeed.  Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.  He makes statutes or decisions possible or impossible to be executed “[Speech at Ottawa, 1858].

Where is Vladimir Putin taking Russia?  He is not preparing for World War III, as used to be feared from the old Soviet Union.  He is on record at aiming to reestablish a wider federation of Eurasian states, in order to restore Russia as a great power on a par with the Group of 7.  This might be done by persuasion, as in Gorbachev’s draft union treaty of 1991.  The worst process would be use of force and civil war, as in 1917-24.  Putin has shown the way with the establishment of his Eurasian Customs Union (now called Economic Union), which is a value-neutral, collective security and nonaggression pact (no democracy and human rights as in the Helsinki accords).  It seems to be envisaged as an equal contender to the European Union.  He speaks of it as a community “from Vancouver to Vladivostok.”  This is not too far from Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision of a “Common European Home” (1987).  It would be good to remember that vision, as Prof. Guido Montani, Dott. Domenico Moro, and I have been doing.

Yet the West sees every action by President Putin as an act of aggression.  This goes back, of course, to his seizure of Crimea in 2014.  To be fair, Putin made it clear, in his address of 18 March 2014, that Ukrainian corruption and NATO expansion threatened Russian security.  The Russian naval base at Sevastopol was at stake.  Putin conducted a plebiscite in which 82 percent of the electorate (1.5 million Russians, 350,000 Ukrainians, plus Tartars) took part. The vote was 96 percent in favor of returning Crimea to Russia. (It had been donated to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954.)  Putin claimed that the soldiers who fought to defend independent Crimea were drawn from the Russians living there. What he did, I contend, was within his rights as leader of a sovereign state with no recourse for settlement available at a higher international level.  It was no worse than the seizure of Kosovo from Serbia by the U.S. and NATO in 1999 in defiance of the U.N. Charter, as Putin said.

This view, which Gorbachev (in his old age) confirmed,[ii] has been treated by the West as sheer propaganda justifying aggression.  Financial sanctions were immediately imposed by the U.S. Congress, most members of the European Union, and other states ranging from Norway to Japan. Russia was charged with invasion and seizure of territory like that of Iraq against Kuwait in 1990. Vice-President Biden at the time said, “These asymmetrical advances on another country cannot be tolerated. The international system will collapse if they are.”  Sanctions since 2014 have kept Russia’s annual economic growth to 0.3 percent, while the global average has been 2.3 percent, and they have cost Western businesses over $700 billion.[iii] But the effect has not been to reverse the fate of Crimea.

How true is the charge of aggression?  And is the West so innocent of comparable acts?  Westerners find the comparison of Crimea with Kosovo strained, but Kosovo was an internal province of Slavic Serbia, not an independent state, and Russian fears of losing Ukraine, then notoriously corrupt, and Georgia, wracked by civil war, to NATO is understandable.  We forget how we took in all the former Warsaw Pact states and broke promises to Gorbachev that Germany, reunited, would not be added to NATO.  It wasn’t so long ago that the U.S. invaded a sovereign state, Iraq in 2003, in order to change its government, by our standards dictatorial.  And before that, a long war in Vietnam, blockade and embargo of Cuba, invasion of the Dominican Republic and Granada, blockades and counter-insurgencies in Central America, and for that matter war with Mexico in 1846 to take all of her territory north of the Rio Grande.  Historically, states change their borders hardly ever by peaceful agreement.  We could have demanded that Russia give back Crimea to the Tartars, since it was Catherine the Great who took it from them in 1783!

President Putin is not taking an aggressive stance.  It is said that Putin is seeking more “predictability and stability” in his relation to the West, more “respect for Russia” in the ranks of great powers.  This can be seen in his April 21st address  to Russia’s Federal Assembly.  Most of it is about meeting the pandemic, helping families and single mothers with direct payments, opening schools, reducing greenhouse gases, and uniting people in the federation.  Only the last few pages are devoted to foreign policy, which is a resolute defense of Russia against “the practice of politically motivated, illegal economic sanctions and to certain actors’ brutal attempts to impose their will on others by force.”  There is even a passage that seems to me to be an opening to something like the old “Common European Home” of regional security on Russia’s borders.  In the context of his Eurasian Economic Union, he says, “There are new, interesting projects here, such as the development of transport and logistics corridors.  I am sure they will become a reliable infrastructure backbone for large-scale Eurasian partnership.”  This speech reads rather like President Biden’s great speech of April 28 on a “blue collar blueprint to build America.”

How do we “restore respect” for Russia?  We can recognize our own provocations and aggressions.  We can make an effort to understand Russia.  Its centralization of power has been a strategic necessity to defend itself, located on a vast Eurasian plain.  We can see Russia as a partner rather than an adversary in Eastern Europe.  We can ask for a “generous act” on the part of European leaders, like bringing Russia back into the Group of 8, rather than continuing to hurt her people by sanctions.  We can take up Putin’s offer to find some way to cooperate with his Eurasian Economic Union.

In conclusion, I would not want it to be said that I have overlooked the larger context of global governance.  Here, too, the E.U. will be a leader, even if the U.S.A. shrinks from this path so in accord with its revolutionary heritage.  There are five books that show the way forward:  Augusto Lopez-Claros and others’ Global Governance and the Emergence of Global Institutions for the 21st Century,^[iv] Jo Leinen and Andreas Bummel’s A World Parliament,^[v] the Stimson Center’s Beyond UN75: A Roadmap,^[vi] Joseph Schwartzberg’s Transforming the United Nations System,^[vii] and my own history, The Politics of World Federation.^[viii]

The revolutionary implications of democracy at the world level are sensed but approached very cautiously because of official fears of popular abuses.  Traditions of state sovereignty (independence and non-intervention into domestic affairs) are very resistant to popular sovereignty at the international level.  Most great powers – America, Russia, China – claim exceptionalism, which is the formula for continued international anarchy.  Functionalism, as in the E.U., and two-thirds majority rule, as in the U.N., seem to be slowly preparing states and their peoples for the new fundamental principle, in place of sovereignty, of humanity.  That means world citizenship, a readiness to see all persons as equals.  It means a readiness to elect representatives to a world legislature, and to obey the common laws.  It means majority rule of popular representatives in place of the anarchy of sovereign states.

It is customary in articles on intractable international problems to end on a note of what would be necessary to establish world democracy and perpetual peace, as if that is almost a joke.  But I must tell you, that is not where I end.  I begin with studies of global governance and world federalism.  The first principles must change.

[i] Larsen, Henrik B.L.  NATO’s Democratic Retrenchment: Hegemony after the Return of History. Oxon: Routledge, 2020.   https://www.google.com/books/edition/NATO_s_Democratic_Retrenchment/dTuhDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

Shelest, Hanna [National Institute for Strategic Studies, Ukraine].  “Transformation of the NATO Partnership Concept in the Post-Soviet Space: Is Membership the Only Option?” NATO Commissioned Volume, 2015.  https://www.google.com/books/edition/Newcomers_No_More_Contemporary_NATO_and/IdASBgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

Special thanks to Dr. Tiziana Stella, Streit Council for a Union of Democracies, for these references.

[ii] Mikhail Gorbachev, The New Russia (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 377-80.

[iii] Anders Aslund and Maria Snegovaya, “The Impact of Western Sanctions on Russia…” 3 May 2021.  www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports.

[iv] Augusto Lopez-Claros, Arthur L. Dahl, and Maja Groff, Global Governance and the Emergence of Global Institutions for the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press, 2020).  Free under Open Access at:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/global-governance-and-the-emergence-of-global-institutions-for-the-21st-century/AF7D40B152C4CBEDB310EC5F40866A59

[v] Jo Leinen and Andreas Bummel, trans. Ray Cunningham, A World Parliament: Governance and Democracy in the 21st Century (Berlin: Democracy without Borders, 2018).

[vi] Maria Fernanda Espinosa and Danilo Türk, co-chairs, Commission on Global Security, Justice and Governance, Report, Beyond UN75: A Roadmap for Inclusive, Networked and Effective Global Governance, June 2021. https://ggin.stimson.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/GGIN-Report-061721-1.pdf

[vii] Joseph E. Schwartzberg, Transforming the United Nations System: Designs for a Workable World (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2013).

[viii] Joseph Preston Baratta, The Politics of World Federation, Vol. I: United Nations, U.N. Reform, Atomic Control; Vol. II: From World Federalism to Global Governance (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).