New Atlantic Charter between the US and the UK: Beijing recipient. Here is the new Anglo-American century
Boris Johnson and Joe Biden opened the first G7 in presence among the world leaders since the beginning of the pandemic with a bang: the signing of the new Atlantic Charter , already announced previously by their respective Sherpas, between London and Washington. Facing the sea and the Cornish wind, the first face-to-face meeting between BoJo and the new US president took place. A meeting prepared for some time by the British side. Since last summer, the Tory leader has taken decisive steps to meet Biden and get rid of that patina – albeit very apparent – of "Trumpism" that has marked his rise to the top of the party and the country.
The abandonment of Huawei 's 5G and the plan for the "green revolution" were signals in this sense also to the new American administration. Thus the solidity of the UK-US alliance in the present and also in the future was reaffirmed – if ever there was a need for it. Of course, Biden expressed concern about the situation in Ulster and the diatribes between London and Brussels, but in the end, while Johnson called the alliance "indestructible" at the BBC , a new, ambitious, Atlantic Charter was signed, which also recalls in the definition, the one signed 80 years ago by Johnson and Biden's predecessors, Churchill and Roosevelt.
Four focal points of the Anglo-American commitment: the end of the pandemic, the new “green revolution”, the economic recovery and the increase in jobs. Does the soil seem fertile for the signing of the great free trade agreement, currently in the gestation phase, between the two countries? Biden got confirmation of his closest ally's intentions, while Johnson got the US president's public recognition as a reliable leader. Something that every British prime minister has always sought from Attlee onwards, that is, ever since London entered the US sphere of influence after World War II.
In the new Charter, the Anglo-American liberal-democratic ideological imprint is strong, just as, reading between the lines, we see that the recipient of this renewed alliance is Beijing. London and Washington reaffirm their bond at a time when the Dragon's assertiveness – and its opposition to the West – is at the highest level. Biden follows Trump's lead in opposing China and pursuing protectionist trade policies within the US ( Buy American ), but deviates from the 45th president's line in terms of the means of opposition. If Trump had set the Western chancelleries on fire with his unilateralist rhetoric, confronting them with a binary choice – US or China – Biden appealed to cooperation between democracies and the tools of multilateralism to curb the rise of Beijing. Will it work?
Certainly, the world has changed a lot compared to 80 years ago. The current war is called Covid , and although Brexit and Trump have marked an important turning point in relations between Europe and the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American world, the West is no longer divided between fascist regimes and liberal democracies. It remains to be seen whether Beijing's new containment measures – cybersecurity , deployment of military assets in the Indo-Pacific, trade war – will have the effect of returning China to a less competitive relationship with Washington and its allies.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/nuova-atlantic-charter-tra-usa-e-uk-destinatario-pechino-ecco-il-nuovo-secolo-angloamericano/ on Sat, 12 Jun 2021 04:03:00 +0000.