Staying Strangers

Journalist Aleksey Zabrodin on why politicians rushed to congratulate Joe Biden, not hiding their joy at Donald Trump’s defeat.

Joe Biden seems to have won, but not officially. Donald Trump apparently lost, but still intends to win. Everyone will know what the litigation will lead to in a few weeks, most likely. However, as the incumbent president noted, it is not within the job description of the American media to declare someone the newly elected president of the United States, since there are special procedures for this. On Dec. 14, the Electoral College must vote and approve the decision of the voters of each state. After that, all attempts by the Republicans to change the results by legal means will lose.

However, now America and the whole world are faced with two facts: Biden has surpassed his opponent in terms of the total number of voters and the number of electors, and Trump strongly denies it. And although this formally means that the U.S. election isn’t over, many world leaders have already lined up to congratulate the Democratic president-elect. Some were quick to share their joy with Biden the same day that CNN announced his victory. And in a number of countries, the authorities and the opposition for the right competed to be the first to pay their respects to the Democratic winner.

This must have upset Trump, who has grown accustomed to the White House in his four years in office. It’s true that he received his first, and only, congratulations on the morning of Nov. 4, when the winner of the race was completely unclear. Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa was delighted with the “completely obvious reelection” of the Republican president. Whether the fact that Trump’s wife Melania comes from Slovenia played any role in this remains a mystery, as well as how the president’s cabinet felt when the friendly chorus of his colleagues was embracing Biden on Twitter.

By Nov. 9, Barack Obama’s former vice president received several dozen congratulations from various politicians from all over the world. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was one of the first to celebrate. There is nothing surprising in the fact that it was the leader of America’s neighbor who became the ringleader of the Biden fan club. He, perhaps, like CNN and The Washington Post, openly counted down the minutes until Trump was “overthrown.” But unlike the prime minister of Slovenia, the Canadian leader immediately gained support from Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Boris Johnson, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Polish President Andrezej Duda, among others.

Particularly distinguished among these ranks are Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy; the elected and self-proclaimed leaders of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro and Juan Guaido; Georgian Prime Minister Georgy Gakharia; and former presidential candidate of Belarus Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.

For Zelenskiy, the American race was decisive. Trump was not particularly interested in Ukraine, and Washington emphatically expressed support for Kyiv out of inertia. Biden is considered a “friend of the Ukrainian people,” one of the ideologues of the Maidan uprising in 2014, and he himself has repeatedly emphasized that under his administration, the United States will firmly take up the construction and prosperity of Ukrainian democracy. It would seem that Zelenskiy is right to rejoice: The Americans will turn their gaze to Ukraine again and help as much as they can. But the Ukrainian leader may be worried about his political prospects. The Democratic Biden was in many ways a “friend,” first of all, to the Maidan elite, which the “servant of the people” put out of business in May 2019. In addition, the Ukrainian president sided with Trump in the corruption scandal involving Biden and his son, Hunter, although he diplomatically tried to disguise it.

The Georgian prime minister hastened to congratulate his country’s “old friend” for approximately the same reasons as the Ukrainian president. With direct support from the United States, Georgia had long fallen out of the Russian orbit, but under Trump it was forgotten. Therefore, it would be a sin not to be among the first to recognize the next president of America.

Maduro was gladdened by the news of the imminent departure of the Republican president, and he didn’t wait to say so. The current U.S. administration has been trying for several years to overthrow the Venezuelan leader and is barely refraining from forcefully interfering in the country’s affairs. Additionally, self-proclaimed president Guaido, who was treated kindly by the current White House administration, clearly does not want to fall out of grace and rushed to congratulate Biden — showing that, in general, it doesn’t matter to him which American president makes Venezuela great again.

Tikhanovskaya did not hesitate to remind Biden to pay attention to Belarus. The opposition leader emphasized that “unlike Belarus, where votes in the election were simply stolen, in the United States the vote of every voter is taken into account,” and expressed her hope for a quick meeting with Biden. It’s easy to understand the former presidential candidate, because Trump was not particularly interested in the future of the Belarussian people. But the phrase about the importance of “the vote of every voter” in the United States turned out to be quite comical, given the unprecedented scandal of counting ballots in the 2020 American election.

There were, of course, other politicians who congratulated Biden on his victory or joined in after a day or two. But the fact is that the Democratic candidate managed to become the newly elected president of the United States and recognized by the world before the vote count was even finished, and Trump hasn’t abandoned his effort to seek a different result in court. This clearly demonstrated how alien Trump was to most of his colleagues. They put up with him, because in 2016 the American people decided to make him their helmsman, but they waited for the moment to forget this period like a bad dream. This is especially true of the United States’ European partners.

Trump was unpredictable; his vision of American leadership was not the free support of allies and democracy abroad, but above all else, in the economic well-being of the United States as he understood it. America First was not about domination outside of the country. He broke well-established “corporate” rules in the West and couldn’t give a damn about the opinion of Germany, for example, if he believed that it would be better for Americans.

The Republican president was inconvenient for Russia as well, although he had dreams of cooperation. But the arms control alliances, almost completely destroyed, and numerous sanctions are unlikely to leave anyone with any illusion of cooperation. Russian-American relations began to decline under Obama and hit bottom under Trump. It is unlikely that any restoration of relationships will take place under Biden, but the Democratic president-elect is at least traditional, and it is already somewhat clear what can be expected of him. In general, almost nothing good.

Perhaps, given Biden’s openly aggressive attacks on Russia, the country he identified as America’s No. 1 enemy, Vladimir Putin did not rush to congratulate the Democratic president-elect on his victory. Biden is not yet inclined to make an ideological reset. It is possible to solve the problems with arms control, which, by the way, the Democratic president-elect seems inclined to do, once the Americans finish their internecine showdown.