The omens for the new year were not good when more than 60,000 peoplegathered in the emblematic New York Times Squarethey celebrated the arrival of 2022.
Led by Joe Bidenwhom many dismissed as senile and whose only international result in 2021 had been the hasty withdrawal of his troops from Afghanistan, the Americans had little to be proud of.
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In 2021 they had witnessed the advance of China as a world power capable of equaling and even surpassing Uncle Sam. And they had endured the aggressiveness of the Russian president, Vladimir Putindetermined to recover the borders of the Soviet empire of the 20th century, without Washington or the Europeans seeming to stop him.
The differences between the White House and its European allies had only grownto such an extent that NATO, the military alliance that they forged USA and the governments of the Old Continent after World War II, had been declared “brain dead” by French President Emmanuel Macron.
The first days of 2022 marked the first anniversary of the assault on the headquarters of Congress in Washington, by the most radical supporters of Trump, an image that shamed American democracy and made many think that nothing would stop the decline of democracy. world power that, in the 20th century, had won two world wars and had defeated the communist enemy after decades of the Cold War. But Everything changed and, two weeks before the end of the year that was looking so bad, Biden and the United States seem strengthened. What happened?
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war without GI
At the end of February, when Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine, the Kremlin was convinced that it would achieve its goals in just 10 days. The Russian leaders calculated that this time would be enough to dominate half the country, take the capital kyiv and depose and capture the president. Volodymyr Zelensky.
From the first moment, Biden committed to supporting kyiv and convinced Congress of it. “Investing in the freedom and security of Ukraine is a small price to pay to punish Russian aggression and reduce the risk of future conflicts,” he told senators and representatives to convince them to provide financial support, as well as arms and ammunition, to Zelensky. .
Seamless US support for Ukraine makes it the big winner, with not a single GI ever setting foot on Ukrainian soil
By mid-May, not only did the Kremlin targets look far away, but Zelensky’s troops had destroyed hundreds of Russian tanks, killed thousands of Putin’s soldiers and forced the foreign army back. As Axel Gyldén, a chronicler for the French weekly L’Express, said at the time, in less than three months “fear changed camp.”
By mid-September and thanks to its tenacity, its mobility and its courage, but also to the enormous support in weapons, ammunition and intelligence information from the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom and the European Union, the army de Zelensky launched a fierce counteroffensive. In a few weeks he recovered 20 percent of the Ukrainian territory that Putin had intended to annex to Russia, and more than half of the area that came to be invaded at the beginning of the war.
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Putin was in trouble, with a third of his men and military equipment lost, with his economy severely hit by Western sanctions, and with sections of the Russian population in rebellion over conscription ordered to replace troops lost in the fighting. .
Meanwhile, Biden rubbed his hands together. After making it clear that Russia had not only ceased to be an economic power (before the war it had not been among the 10 largest economies in the world for some time), but that it was also not a military power, he left Putin with the only alternative of a nuclear attack to try to win the war.
The failure of Putin and Russia is the triumph of Biden and the United States. And it adds to the fact that NATO reacted in a solid and unified manner, with which Washington regained specific weight in Europe. For the first time since 2005, the presence of US military units on European soil exceeded 100,000 men, this time with the advantage of not engaging in combat.
Béatrice Mathieu, economics editor-in-chief of L’Express, put it clearly: “Washington’s seamless support for Ukraine makes the United States the big winner globally without a single GI (foot soldier) having to set foot on Ukrainian soil”.
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the chinese prick
In 2021, by announcing the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan and, days later, sealing a political and military alliance with the United Kingdom and Australia in the Pacific, Biden made it clear that Washington’s strategic focus from now on was to curb Chinese expansionism..
At the insistence of leader Xi Jinping to claim the island of Taiwan as his own territory, Biden wanted to stand up to Beijing. It did not seem easy, but the successive defeats of the Russians in the Ukraine have persuaded the Chinese leadership to think twice about a military operation to appropriate Taiwan.
Internally, Xi achieved, at the Communist Party Congress, his goal of concentrating more power and extending his mandate. But internationally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine complicated his plans: he activated the political and military unity of the United States and Europe, and stimulated the Western military industry.
The dollar is still the King, the refuge value par excellence for investors
As if that were not enough, the Zero Covid strategy promoted by Xi, with its prolonged confinements of entire cities, ended up leaking: it reduced the growth of the Chinese economy by almost half and ended up irritating the citizens, who, in the end, November, they took to the streets of some twenty cities to protest against the confinement.
Xi was forced to give in and ended up dismantling the vast majority of the restrictive measures, with the risk of a spike in contagion already looming, since the great flaw of the Zero Covid strategy is precisely that it has not allowed broad layers of the Chinese population are infected and, for this reason, their bodies have not generated defenses against the virus.
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gas and the dollar
Washington’s triumphs have not only been military and geopolitical. Also, and a lot, cheap. Its military industry, which had been in the doldrums after the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the spending restrictions imposed by the pandemic, received a gigantic boost from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Of the almost 20 billion dollars sent by Washington to support kyiv, at least two thirds correspond to military and technological equipment manufactured in US plants. This has led to a revival of employment not only in the military-industrial complex, but in its supply chain.
China is going to think twice about trying to take over Taiwan by military means.
But The United States has also won in another field: gas. The technology of liquefying natural gas, by lowering its temperature to -160 ºC, allows it to be exported in huge tankers. Thanks to this and the use of unconventional extraction techniques such as fracking, the United States was already on its way to becoming a natural gas export power.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the cut off of Russian gas to Europe favored Norway, Qatar and, above all, the United States, which became, in a matter of months, the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas. And this is thanks above all to the Old Continent, to which, after having exported 26,000 million cubic meters of LNG in 2021, it has exported, so far in 2022, some 45,000 million cubic meters.
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And all this with prices that at times have doubled from last year to this one.
The effect will continue for years to come: as the European Union needs to ensure itself not only in the short, but also in the medium and long term, it signed agreements with the United States a few months ago to purchase up to 50,000 million additional cubic meters of LNG per year, coming from American wells.
As Thierry de Montbrial, French engineer and economist, founder of the World Policy Conference, rightly pointed out, this year in Europe “we have become a little more dependent on the United States (…) because they do work strategically, coldly combining their values with their interests, and now they have decided to become masters of the energy game.”
Due to the above, due to the Federal Reserve’s rate hike and because it is a value that investors look for when a war breaks out, the dollar has also come out on top: this year it was better valued than the euro and almost even with the pound sterling. With reason, the analysts of the European stock markets repeated over and over again this year that “the dollar continues to be king, the refuge value par excellence.”
Of course, the challenges for Washington in 2023 are not small.. The war in the Ukraine still has an uncertain outcome and, with Putin in the Kremlin, the danger signals keep burning. Furthermore, the Chinese expansionist temptation is still there. And the risks of a global recession eventually hitting the United States remain.
And there is also instability in the Middle East: Iran goes ahead with its nuclear plans while in Israel, the return of Benjamin Netanyahu, with his friendship with Putin, his aggressiveness with the Arab countries and his violent volleys against the Gaza Strip, complicate any peace effort.
But in any case, with 16 days to go before the end of 2022, the balance of the year for Biden and for the United States is a broad winner. As Béatrice Mathieu, from the weekly L’Express, explains, at the end of 2022, Washington’s “geostrategic, economic, military and political gains” are undeniable. The word decline is no longer in vogue to talk about the United States.
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