2020: An American Year

From an international perspective, the most important event of the year 2020 - barring unexpected and spectacular developments in the strategic or climate field - is expected to take place on Tuesday 3 November. That is the day on which the Americans will choose their President. Their decision will have geopolitical, political, economic, climatic and, perhaps even more importantly, ethical consequences for the whole world. A divided people with contradictory instincts has an excessive influence on the course of history. This led Stanley Hoffmann, a Harvard professor and famous political scientist, to say, ironically, that the peoples of the world should have a say in the Americans’ choice of their president.

Indeed, the world may have become bipolar (a G2 with China) or multipolar again, but can the world's equilibrium, if not the cause of democracy or even the medium-term survival of the planet, afford four more years of Donald Trump? Internationally, America's chaotic and contradictory withdrawal did not begin with Trump and is therefore likely to continue after him, if he is defeated in 2020. The United States is going through a "Jacksonian moment" in its history, an expression that refers to the seventh American president, Andrew Jackson, and that describes this mixture of nationalist and isolationist tendencies without which America's current relationship with the world cannot be understood.

Similarly, the crisis of democracy in the United States was not born with Trump. Exactly the opposite happened. His election is a symptom, not a cause. Some date the moral crisis that gripped America to Richard Nixon. In fact, it was the profound dysfunction of American democracy, aggravated in its negative consequences by the explosion of economic and social inequalities and the financial and economic crisis of the late 2000s that brought Donald Trump to the White House. And the election in the United States of a more ecologically conscious president will not be enough to meet the challenge of global warming.