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With less than a hundred days in the White House, the Biden-Harris administration, also known as the “Harris administration” as President Biden has called it several times, is surprisingly subjected to a series of crises that are simultaneously unfolding on several levels. In our opinion, all this indicates that it is a previously orchestrated plan that seeks to test the limits of the American response.
The simultaneous crises in the Biden-Harris administration
The United States is facing, domestically, a serious border crisis, specifically in El Paso, in the southern state of Texas, which only yesterday was recognized as such, after a brief statement by Biden, despite repeated denials by his spokesperson Jen Psaki and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.
In crude terms, more than 15,000 adolescents and children cross the border on foot and are taken to shelters where their fate will be later decided, but judging by the actions of the Biden-Harris administration itself, all minors who arrive alone in the United States are likely to stay, prompting the flow of Central American migrants to remain in the thousands.
Meanwhile, in the international arena, the Gordian knot of world politics is today concentrated on Russia, China, and the Middle East. With Russia, in addition to the tensions generated by the trial of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the resurgence of the crisis in Ukraine that culminated in 2014 when Putin annexed Crimea. Everything indicates today that the Russian president is determined to annex the rest of the Ukrainian territory and for this purpose, he deployed thousands of troops to the East of Ukraine.
Further east and already in Asia, the great red dragon of communist China has accentuated its strategy of intimidation against Taiwan, which it considers a “rebel province” and has historically refused to accept its independence. The intimidation is called “military exercises”, first 15 fighter planes, 12 of them of the fighter type, penetrated Taiwanese airspace, and then a Chinese aircraft carrier sailed for the first time over the waters of the South China Sea.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, for the first time, the Iranian government explicitly and directly accused Israel of “nuclear terrorism”, after its nuclear plant in Natanz suffered a power outage. Iran assures that it reserves the right to take measures against the perpetrators.
In short, the Biden-Harris administration inherited from Trump a Russia that is at least not hostile, a China that is naked before the world for its constant practice of piracy, patent theft and unfair trade, as well as a Middle East that is at least stable. With the conjugation of all these simultaneous crises, they are probably trying to measure both Washington’s capacity for reaction and America’s role in the world stage, in which inaction will mark America’s decline.
But America’s luck seems to be already casted for the U.S., beyond the Biden-Harris administration’s rhetoric that “the U.S. is back”, rather than a comeback, it can be seen that American diplomacy will concentrate on the world nuclear agenda, losing a notable protagonism in world politics. Evidence of such signals can be found in its timid action against Russia in the face of the crisis in Ukraine, in addition to leaving Xi Jinping’s government practically with a free hand with respect not only to Taiwan but also to Hong Kong.
In addition to its total absence in Latin America, a space that has been solidly captured by communist China, through mask diplomacy and currently by vaccines, with patent cases such as El Salvador with President Bukele and Paraguay with the blocking of the COVAX mechanism of the World Health Organization (WHO) to force the South American nation to break relations with Taiwan.
Nahem Reyes is a PhD in history from the Andrés Bello Catholix University and associate member of the American Studies Center of the Central University of Venezuela. // Nahem Reyes es doctor en Historia de la Universidad Católica Andrés Bello y miembro asociado del Centro de Estudios de América de la Universidad Central de Venezuela.