2023-05-17 08:19:06
US debt
“How do we look to the rest of the world?”
Faced with the risk of default by the United States, President Biden had to cancel a major tour of Asia, scheduled following the G7 meeting in Japan this weekend.
Published
Republican House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy met with President Joe Biden at the White House on Tuesday. But no agreement has yet been reached on raising the debt ceiling.
How to brag regarding a conquering America when you risk the bankruptcy? Joe Biden, encumbered by a political debt crisis, will nevertheless try in Japan to consolidate its international alliances once morest Beijing. “It’s hard to ‘compete with China’ when you’re so busy sinking your own ship. What do we look like to the rest of the world?” Evan Feigenbaum, Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank and former senior State Department official, tweeted.
Complicated to speak of economic unity once morest Russia and China when “the biggest problem facing the rest of the G7 in the immediate future is (the risk of) a default in payment in the United States”, abounds Josh Lipsky of the Atlantic Council research center.
The American president, who will leave on Wednesday for a G7 summit in Hiroshima (Germany, Canada, United States, France, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom) but had to give up going to Papua New Guinea then to Australia, assures that it can be on all fronts. “The nature of the presidency is to manage a million important issues at the same time, I am sure that we will continue to move forward to avoid a default, and to fulfill America’s responsibilities as a driving force in the scene. international,” he said on Tuesday.
Never seen
Here he is also deprived of the opportunity, when he has just launched his campaign for 2024, to make a triumphant diplomatic tour, before starting to plow the ground in the United States. Instead, the 80-year-old Democrat will return to Washington on Sunday to resume negotiations with the parliamentary opposition on a subject as crucial as it is difficult to understand from abroad: getting Congress to vote on raising the ceiling. debt. Without this, the United States might, from June 1, default. That is to say, being unable to pay wages, pensions and social benefits, and to pay what they owe to their creditors. Never seen.
Canceled therefore a historic visit to Papua New Guinea, an island state in Oceania whose strategic importance is growing at the same time as the relationship between the United States and China is strained over Taiwan. Also forgotten is the visit to Australia, to an ally which has just invested in a very ambitious submarine program. Finally missed the meeting, planned in the spectacular setting of the Sydney Opera House, with the leaders of the Quad, this diplomatic format which particularly bristles Beijing (United States, Australia, Japan, India).
Democracy versus autocracy
This truncated trip is messy for a president who constantly repeats that democracies, to prevail once morest autocracies, must be efficient, responsive and pragmatic. How to unfold this argument, when the Democrats and the Republicans are torn apart by a parliamentary procedure which obliges the American Congress to regularly raise the maximum public debt ceiling? And when the solvency of the world’s largest economy depends on complicated budgetary battles?
All the G7 states display heavy public debts – starting with the host country, Japan, world record of debt compared to the gross domestic product – but none faces this kind of political imbroglio.
(AFP)
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