NEW YORK – Turkish leader Erdogan is refusing to meet U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken because he is angry about Washington’s support for Israel. Biden’s secretary of state’s meeting with the head of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which lasted less than an hour: the dialogue is marred by disagreements on the key issue of the ceasefire. The president of the United States, Israel’s only strategic ally, again received a resounding “no” from Netanyahu on Monday to calls not for a ceasefire but for temporary humanitarian pauses in Gaza. Although the Pentagon calls for the use of less destructive and more targeted weapons in Hamas’s underground corridors, it continues to rain 900-pound bombs, the most powerful in Israel’s conventional arsenal, which were never intended for use in urban warfare.
The US diplomatic offensive appears to have failed: the superpower is unable to force a course correction from the country that supports it with military supplies worth almost $4 billion a year and is suffering an insult from the leader of a NATO partner country.
Confident that he will be remembered by posterity for how he sought to restore order in the West and in international relations after the tumultuous Trump era, Joe Biden must be aware of the limits of America’s ability to do so to influence different areas of the world. The flames in the Middle East are compounding problems in Ukraine, the other conflict that should have defined his international political legacy. Biden defended Kiev’s independence, strengthened relations with the West, launched and expanded NATO, forced Putin to renounce his imperial goals, but now the war in Eastern Europe is at a standstill and the White House is stuck between Zelensky and he rejects compromise and a congress ab It is becoming increasingly difficult to vote on military aid packages without seeing a path that can lead to an end to the conflict.
In an increasingly multipolar world with new ruthless regional powers (Turkey, which is in NATO but does not impose sanctions on Russia, talks to Putin but supplies Ukraine with drones that it can use against Moscow based on technologies it from Israel, today’s arch-enemy) or ready By using non-state entities (Iran, which uses Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and partly also Hamas) to launch “proxy” offensives, it is for It is becoming increasingly difficult for America to maintain the balance of the international order. An order that survived the collapse of the Soviet empire but is now severely damaged by two factors: the progressive shift of balance towards Asia and the South of the world and the inability of the West to recognize the importance of the global role that this world plays. not even recognized internally It is not just about economic stability, but also stability that is linked to respect for human rights and democratic values. We have tried to bring them into tribal societies (with little success), while today we are moving towards the tribalization of democratic societies, also due to digital technologies.
In such a conflicted and fragmented world, it is important for the US (which is dealing with allies who doubt Biden’s stability while Moscow and Beijing await Trump’s return) to prevent conflicts from expanding and engaging those there before resolving them to avoid stationed American forces in the Middle East. Here, Blinken’s meetings with Arab countries and the Palestinian Authority, although in a very negative phase, may have helped prevent the Hamas-triggered mines that are setting the Arab world ablaze from exploding even more violently.