Playing with fire

The date will have to be remembered: on August 2, 2022, the leader of the House of Representatives, the brave 82-year-old Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, landed on an official visit to Taiwan, despite threats from the Chinese government that considers the ancient island of Formosa as part of its territory. Anyone who does not understand that the U.S.-China trade war goes far beyond rhetoric, is mistaken, it is a strategic confrontation, which will not even change much whether Republicans or Democrats govern in the near future. In Mexico, it seems that we are not understanding anything that happens in much of the world and especially in our relationship with the United States, despite the fact that we have highly trained officials both in the Foreign Ministry and in the Embassy in Washington. In the National Palace they seem to think that it is time to do “nationalist” politics to win votes, to challenge a government that they see weakened, to put in check economic, financial, social, very complex political relations, even to play with geopolitics, to flirt with Cuba, Venezuela, Russia and China while challenging the United States in order to “pressure” the White House and the Capitol, with whom we have worse and worse relationships. They don’t understand that they’re playing with fire and they’re going to end up burned. The new book by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, says virtually nothing new about the way the previous US government “doubled” (to use his term, as Trump himself had already used) López Obrador’s on the immigration issue, threatening him with tariffs and even playing with the possibility of military intervention if migratory flows (and the operation of criminal groups) were not stopped. But the book exhibits the levers available to a power like the American Union to do so. It happened with Mexico with the migration issue, but it happens today with Taiwan and China or just the weekend with the death by a drone attack against the leader of Al Qaeda and real mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Al Zarahawi in Kabul, where the Taliban thought they could violate the Doha agreements that led to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan without consequences. So did Vladimir Putin who believed he could take Kiev and end the intervention in Ukraine in 72 hours and has been stuck in the east of that country for months, at a very high social and military cost. Of course, the United States is a country weakened above all by its own mistakes, none as costly as the Trump presidency, but we should not be mistaken: the great powers remember and do it very well, when they are challenged and sooner or later they usually charge the slights. Mexico has been accumulating them with Biden since the day of his election: we were among the last countries in the world to recognize his triumph, giving wings to Trump’s delusions that he had suffered a fraud; we were slow to establish an efficient relationship with the new government; even in Trump’s time in the controversial visit to the White House in the middle of the electoral campaign (another affront to Biden) the explicit demand was to respect the commitments assumed by Mexico, and with Biden in the government that demand was ignored. The White House has sent all its staff to Mexico, starting with Kamala Harris, John Kerry, Alejandro Mayorkas, among many others and President López Obrador has met twice with Biden, but we did not go to the summit of the Americas in Los Angeles because Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, three dictatorships, were not invited. On July 4, the day of the independence of the United States, we asked for Julian Assange and the president said that to tear down the statue of liberty if it was stopped, but on July 26 we made, in the middle of the National Palace, a heartfelt tribute to the Cuban regime, in power since 1959. A year earlier, on September 16, the keynote speaker on our independence day, along with the Secretary of National Defense, General Luis Crescencio Sandoval, was none other than Cuban President Miguel Díaz Canel. A couple of days before, at a meeting of Latin American leaders in Mexico City, the guests were Díaz Canel himself and Nicolás Maduro, and by video conference the one who spoke to boost the presence of his country in the region was Chinese President Xi Jing Ping.No we know exactly what happened with the arrest of Caro Quintero, but we do know that U.S. agencies participated. The U.S. attorney general celebrated what he called the kingpin’s “immediate extradition.” But weeks have passed and nothing indicates that this extradition will even be swift. Using Caro Quintero, a man that the United States rightly claims for 35 years, as a bargaining chip in the bilateral relationship would be a very serious mistake, which would converge.He would triumph over his arrest into a controversial defeat. Meanwhile, 80 percent of our trade is with the United States, there live millions of countrymen who send the country 50 billion dollars in remittances, and that’s where our main foreign investments come from. And in the National Palace they play with fire.



Original source in Spanish