The date will have to be remembered: on August 2, 2022, the leader of the House of Representatives, the fierce 82-year-old Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, landed on an official visit to Taiwan, despite threats from the Chinese government that considers the former island of Formosa as part of its territory. Whoever does not understand that the trade war between the United States and China goes far beyond rhetoric is mistaken, it is a strategic confrontation, which will not even change much whether Republicans or Democrats govern in the near future.
In Mexico, it seems that we are not understanding anything of what is happening in much of the world and especially in our relationship with the United States, despite the fact that we have highly trained officials both in the Foreign Ministry and in the Washington embassy. In the National Palace they seem to think that it is time to engage in “nationalist” politics to win votes, to challenge a government that they see as weakened, to put very complex economic, financial, social and political relations in check, even to play with geopolitics, to flirting with Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and China while challenging the United States in order to “pressure” the White House and the Capitol, with which we have increasingly worse relations. They do not understand that they are playing with fire and will end up burned.
The new book by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, says practically nothing new about the way in which the previous US government “bent” (to use his term, as Trump himself had already used it) that of López Obrador on the immigration issue. , threatening it with tariffs and even playing with the possibility of a military intervention if the migratory flows (and the operation of the criminal groups) were not stopped. But the book exhibits the levers available to a power like the American Union to do so.
It happened with Mexico with the migration issue, but it happens today with Taiwan and China or just this weekend with the death by a drone attack against the leader of Al Qaeda and the real mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Al Zarahawi in Kabul. , where the Taliban thought they could violate the Doha agreements that led to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan without consequence. The same thought Vladimir Putin believed that he could take kyiv and end the intervention in Ukraine in 72 hours and has been stagnant in the east of that country for months, at a very high social and military cost.
Of course, the United States is a country weakened above all by its own mistakes, none as costly as the Trump presidency, but we should not be mistaken: the great powers remember and do it very well, when they are challenged and sooner or later they usually take the snubs Mexico has been accumulating them with Biden since the day of his election: we were one of the last countries in the world to recognize his victory, giving wings to Trump’s delusions that he had suffered a fraud; we were slow to establish an efficient relationship with the new government; even in times of Trump in the controversial visit to the White House in the middle of the electoral campaign (another affront to Biden) the explicit demand was to respect the commitments assumed by Mexico, already with Biden in government that demand was ignored.
The White House has sent its entire staff to Mexico, starting with Kamala Harris, John Kerry, Alejandro Mayorkas, among many others, and President López Obrador has met twice with Biden, but we did not go to the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles because Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, three dictatorships, were not invited. On July 4, the day of the independence of the United States, we asked for Julián Assange and the president said that he would tear down the statue of liberty if he was arrested, but on July 26 we paid a heartfelt tribute to the Cuban regime in the National Palace. , in power since 1959. A year earlier, on September 16, the main speaker of our independence day, together with the Secretary of National Defense, General Luis Crescencio Sandoval, was none other than Cuban President Miguel Díaz Cinnamon. A couple of days earlier, at a meeting of Latin American leaders in Mexico City, the guests were Díaz Canel himself and Nicolás Maduro, and by video conference the one who spoke to promote the presence of his country in the region was the Chinese president. Xi Jing Ping.
We do not know exactly what happened with the arrest of Caro Quintero, but we do know that US agencies participated. The US attorney general celebrated what he called the “immediate extradition” of the capo. But weeks have passed and nothing indicates that this extradition will even be quick. Using Caro Quintero, a man that the United States has rightly claimed for 35 years, as a bargaining chip in the bilateral relationship would be a very serious mistake, which would turn the triumph of his arrest into a controversial defeat.
Meanwhile, 80 percent of our trade is with the United States. Millions of countrymen live there and send 50 billion dollars in remittances to the country, and that’s where our main foreign investments come from. And in the National Palace they play with fire.
#Play #fire