Putin, Erdogan, Xi… These autocrats who mourn Biden’s victory

It is a silence heavy with meaning. While many countries congratulated Joe Biden on his US presidential victory this weekend, several leaders stood out for the lack of official reaction, a sign of the embarrassment caused by the election of the Democratic candidate to the White House but also the close and at least ambiguous relationship that these authoritarian leaders had with outgoing President Donald Trump.

Vladimir Putin, pro-Trump assumed

This Monday afternoon, almost 48 hours after the announcement of the election results by the American media, no message of congratulations had been sent by Vladimir Putin. A strong man to whom Donald Trump had a certain admiration, the Russian president has never hidden his sympathy for his American counterpart, whom he has also admitted to having wished for victory in the 2016 ballot. elsewhere accused by intelligence and American justice of interference in the previous presidential campaign in favor of the Republican candidate.

But Donald Trump has always rejected the conclusions of his own services on this subject, raising suspicion about the real nature of his links with Moscow. On the international scene, the disruptive attitude of the resident of the White House – his permanent twists and his aversion to multilateralism – has weakened his closest Western allies, and played into the hands of Russia. Taking advantage of the withdrawal of the United States from the Near and Middle East, already initiated by Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin pushed his pawns into the Syrian and Libyan conflicts, allowing Russia to pose as a key player in the region.

While personal relations between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have turned out to be positive, they have not, however, improved the tumultuous bilateral relationship between the United States and Russia. Under pressure from Congress and the American administration, Washington stepped up sanctions against Moscow on the many subjects of disagreement between the two countries: Russian annexation of Crimea, poisoning of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal, Russian interference in American elections …

The return to business of the Democrats, still scalded by the tragic experience of the 2016 presidential election, where they were the first targets of Russian piracy, does not go in the direction of appeasement. Criticized for his silence, Vladimir Putin announced, through the voice of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, that he was awaiting the announcement of the official results of the US presidential election – even if they leave little doubt – to decide and that he “will respect[it] the choice of the American people, whoever they are ”. 4 years ago, the Russian president had not yet taken so many precautions in congratulating Donald Trump barely an hour after the first projections of the American media.

Erdogan, “autocrat” according to Biden

Another head of state who has not yet congratulated Joe Biden on Monday afternoon, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It must be said that relations between the two men are already stormy. In December 2019, the Democratic candidate did not hesitate to qualify the “Raïs” as “autocrat” in a video released by the New York Times. Openly taking sides against the Turkish president, Joe Biden had said he wanted to “embolden” Erdogan’s opponents so that he leaves power “not by a coup d’etat, but by the electoral process”. Last month, the former vice-president of Barack Obama persisted in believing that the Trump administration should “put pressure” on Turkey to end its “provocations” in the eastern Mediterranean, where Ankara intends to drill in the Greek and Cypriot maritime waters.

It must be said that the authoritarian drift of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inside and outside his borders, has not met any real opposition from Donald Trump over the past four years. On the contrary, the fascination felt by the American president with regard to his Turkish counterpart as well as his taste for bilateral transactions have been interpreted by the master of Ankara as a blank check to push his military advantage in the region. Thus, the withdrawal of most of the American troops from northeastern Syria laid the groundwork for the Turkish operation against the anti-Daesh Kurdish forces in the cities of Tall Abyad and Ras al-Ain in October 2019.

The lack of interest in the United States in resolving the crisis in Libya allowed Recep Tayyip Erdogan to play his own part by sending Turkish military advisers, arms and Syrian Islamist fighters to the scene in support. to the government of Tripoli, the only one recognized by the international community. Likewise, Washington’s refusal to oppose Ankara within NATO, coupled with the impossibility for the European Union to agree on sanctions, encouraged Turkey to continue its maritime explorations in off Cyprus and Greece, in defiance of international law.

Symbol of the feeling of impunity felt by Erdogan, the purchase and then the activation by Ankara of the Russian anti-missile defense system S-400 which, if it endangers the functioning of the Atlantic Alliance on its southern flank, does not has so far resulted in no US sanction. The relative American leniency enjoyed by the Turkish president was also manifested in the case of the Halkbank, a Turkish bank pinned by Washington for having bypassed American sanctions on Iran and that Donald Trump has long protected. For his former national security adviser, Donald Trump “bestowed personal favors on dictators he liked,” says John Bolton in his book The room where it happened (Talent Éditions).

End of romance with Kim

Not surprisingly, no official reaction has come from North Korea either, a country which is not in the habit of commenting on the results of the US presidential elections anyway. But the relationship between the new US president and Kim Jong-un is already shaping up to be chilly. In November 2019, the official North Korean agency KCNA did not hesitate to compare the Democratic candidate to a “mad dog”, who must be “beaten to death with a stick”. But Joe Biden knows how to reciprocate. During the last presidential debate, the Democrat called Kim Jong-un a “thug,” whom he compared to Hitler. And to warn: “The Biden administration will not crack love letters. A reference to the astonishing letter correspondence maintained for months between the North Korean leader and the outgoing American president.

Few international leaders have benefited as much from Donald Trump’s tenure as the “dear leader”. After promising him “fire and fury” following his intercontinental ballistic missile tests, the US president agreed to meet Kim Jong-un three times, thus becoming the first resident of the White House to surrender. in North Korea. These historic summits, where the relationship between the two men was blithely staged, allowed the North Korean leader to break his diplomatic isolation and to treat as an equal with the president of the world’s leading power, without however give him the slightest concession.

Thus, the deep differences on both sides over the very objective of the negotiations – the denuclearization of North Korea or the Korean peninsula as a whole – threw up talks that were already making experts skeptical. Unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden should return to a more classic American diplomacy with regard to Pyongyang: no dialogue with Pyongyang without a significant concession.

Xi’s astonishing silence

The real surprise of this weekend lies in the lack of reaction to date from Xi Jinjping. Trained by Donald Trump in a trade war in 2018, the Chinese president has refrained from commenting on the election of the Democratic president for the time being, Beijing arguing that the final result of the election is not yet known. “We have taken note that Mr. Biden declared himself the winner of the election,” said Wang Wenbin, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry. He added: “To our knowledge, the outcome of the election will be determined by the laws and procedures in force in the United States. ”

In 2016, the Chinese President had however congratulated Donald Trump the day after the election. While he has imposed numerous tariffs on China in an attempt to reduce its trade deficit with Beijing, the American billionaire has always praised the authoritarian secretary general of the Communist Party of China, rejoicing, for example, that ‘he is “president for life”. Priority of the United States since the administration of Barack Obama, the American will to contain the development of China will not fade with Joe Biden.

Quite the contrary. The former vice-president of Barack Obama, who once believed in the democratization of the Middle Kingdom through its economic openness, has now made a point: “The United States must be firm with the China, ”he repeats over and over. To the trade war and the military challenge posed by China should be added another subject of dispute between Washington and Beijing: respect for human rights. Joe Biden has already made it known that he will give this issue a special place in his diplomacy during his term of office. During the presidential campaign, the team of the Democratic candidate thus qualified as “genocide” the repression by China of its Uighur Muslim community, affirming that “Joe Biden opposes it in the strongest terms”.