Il ruolo internazionale degli Stati Uniti alla prova di COVID-19

[Autom. eng. transl.] The spread of COVID-19 poses an important challenge to the United States and impacts at a delicate moment in its historical and political parable. For some years, the country has been going through a complex phase, in which the transformations of the domestic political landscape are welded to the questioning, on the international level, of the liberal order that has established itself during the twentieth century and of which the United States they are traditionally the pivot. The social and economic effects of the epidemic risk giving these processes unexpected turns, on the one hand by accelerating trends that are already underway, on the other by triggering new dynamics that are difficult to predict. As in other situations, the response to the emergency was marked by uncertainties and tensions, which in the US context have brought to light structural issues, linked, among other things, to the role that the public hand should play in the economy and to the relationship that it should exist between federal government and local authorities. At the same time, the dislocation processes that the spread of the virus has triggered in the international system forcefully raise the questions already raised about the future of multilateralism and the current system of political and economic interdependence. The imminence of the presidential vote and the presence in the White House of the cumbersome figure of Donald Trump (in turn the cause and effect of the growing polarization of national political life) add to the picture a further element of complexity, intertwining short and long term issues. and superimposing on the structural dynamics the cyclical needs of an electoral campaign which, although out of the information cone of light, nevertheless continues under the radar.