Il world looks at America and America looks at the world. It is a nation founded and built by immigrants. As the decades passed, his gaze broadened beyond Old Europe. Barack Obama had roots in Kenya, Kamala Harris has roots in Jamaica and India. While Donald Trump, with his Scottish and German ancestry is still a WASP model, white and Protestant. America looks at the world and still feels, albeit dented, the white city on top of the hill. The longed-for destination, the homeland of freedom. But it is the gaze of the world that is changing. Harris is aware of this, more than Obama. The Indian roots help. Indians look to the West. They remember. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre, 13 April 1919. An important date in local school books, 1500 demonstrators massacred by General Dyer’s English colonial troops. A date unknown to us, but very present in the memory of the Indians. One of the many examples of the Global South not being all that inclined to “thank the West”.
The pendulum swings but Harris is certainly more in tune with the new spirit of the times blowing from the South. Trump’s ideas, in this sense, seem to be restoration. He not only wants to be thanked, but also paid for American protection and benevolence. From Koreans, Japanese, and Europeans. Yet, even if The Donald were to overturn the latest predictions and do it himself, a page in the relations between America and the world closes. The page of hegemony, of the hyperpower alone governing everyone. The post-colonial page. From Restore Hope in Somalia in the early 1990s to Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2001-2021, for thirty years Democratic and Republican neocons have tried to straighten the crooked wood of autocracies, dictatorships, and other enemies of Western values. The missions almost always ended in retreat. The project of a new Middle East, the Wolfowitz project, has left above all rubble and two states, one nuclear, the other almost, which are at a showdown. The Arab Muslim world is still dominated by autocracies, Israel oscillates between grandiose expansion plans and the subtle fear of being abandoned and submerged by a hostile Islamic neighbourhood, one and a half billion people.
But above all, among this smoking rubble, the latest of which is that of Gaza, a vast, at times uncontainable feeling has emerged about the double standard, men with more rights and others less, an intolerance to the lessons on “how it is right to live” coming from Washington, and also from European capitals. And so the great formatting of the world according to American canons, planned thirty years ago, returns to the drawer of dreams. The isolationist, Jacksonian Trump would throw it straight into the trash can. But Ukraine will have to be defended from a Russia that allies itself with the Global South and at the same time expands with practices of old colonialism, a contradiction so evident as to be a good lever to use to separate, as far as possible, Moscow from Beijing . And then we will have to clarify what future to give to the Palestinians, and whether they have the right to the same level of protection, for example, that we are trying to give to the Ukrainians, or not. Harris seems to have the qualities to do it, better than Trump. But he too, in case, beyond his rodomontades, would have to deal with it.
