Shake hands. A wonderful gesture. They invented it not to increase the bon ton, but because the hand is open and the other sees that you are not holding the knife or the killing stone. Being friends, not hurting each other, perhaps walking together along the arduous paths of life. This means shaking hands. Its negation is fixed in a verb: to betray.
In ordinary life, countless hands shake, most of unknown people who will soon return. After all, it is a gesture that has become so customary, banal, that it has lost much of its ancient, profound, almost religious meaning.
But in international politics it shouldn’t be like that. Shaking a hand, that hand, means much more than courtesy or form, it has a profound meaning. It is not a gesture, it is a symbol. Not for tyrants. For them it is pure tactic, they can lie shake hands with someone who will soon attack. For this Machiavelli dedicated a book to Cesare Borgia, a character in other ways mediocre. He expertly eliminated the closest collaborators after shaking their hand. And he became immortal by his cynical cunning.
But democracies should, fortunately, have another story. They have to choose, they are forced to choose. Shake hands only with those who respect the same rules. Unfortunately, the devil will continue to tread the stage of the world. But you don’t have to hang out with it, look at yourself in the mirror. Our salvation is radical otherness. One of the shortest and most convincing words is no. The handshake in Munich in 1938 between democracies and totalitarian tyrants is still an example of shame.
Now the complicated, painful war of Ukraine. For the democracies of the West, little by little, day after day, it has also become (and alas above all) a matter of oil and gas. And right there the moral rigor and firmness at any cost against the bully on duty unfortunately gets jammed and undertow.
The leaders of the coalition of the virtuous seem to be rock-hard for now in refusing to shake hands with the aggressor, Putin. Even if someone looks at it as a theoretical possibility, for heaven’s sake … if you couldn’t do without it … after all … they deal so explicitly. Because they are contagious, capable of undermining their moral position, their right to define themselves as the right part of the world.
The purpose is good, indeed necessary, oppose the realists, a dangerous race: we must avoid surrendering to the tsar’s oil blackmail, imposing the only sanction that could really weaken him, canceling him from the list of oil and gas suppliers.
So Biden, who would never agree to shake hands with criminal Putin again, is preparing to do so with a character who is certainly not in the last places in the list of wanted for crimes, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed Ben Salman. . If a single murder of an opponent may seem little in a world panorama of autocrats operating on a Stalinist scale, to the elimination of the journalist Kashoggi, quartered in the consulate in Istanbul, you must add the martyrdom of the innocent in Yemen, bombed with criminal minutia, schools , hospitals, civil districts. Putin, one might say. For those who escape the prince has provided with a murderous blockade of food and medicine. Even Erdogan, who does not have a soft heart and is certainly not a democrat, was indignant at the crime committed, moreover, casually, at his home. Then he too changed his mind.
Biden, after some timid hesitation, will therefore shake hands with the prince, a trip confirmed by the end of June. Oil dictates the law. Salman, with OPEC, has the magic formula to increase production and compensate for Russian oil, which has been removed from the scene with sanctions.
Here we go again. Submissive to feudal kings and corrupt principles, vegetating in the social Middle Ages, illiterate by the Wahhabi verb and terrorist it invented, Arabia lives on the income of the three treasures, oil manna, power of the petrodollars invested in the West and the theological one of Mecca.
Here: the mechanism that should indignant and make us reflect: that is, believe that everything is allowed and approve the decision to afford everything. Biden is convinced that he can open and close the Saudi parenthesis: now there is a war, then the end of the line must be won, everything come down! Except … Except later, after the handshake with the killer prince, nothing is as before. Because these despots of raw materials (who always get along with violence and corruption) feel their wings after the handshake. So publicly comforted by those who are supposed to take away their oxygen for their breath, they give themselves freedom of action. Biden had sworn to treat the prince as a “pariah”. In short, that’s what he guaranteed Putin. In the Kremlin they will be making promising calculations on the moral rigor of the power that defends human rights everywhere and in any case. Unless they harm his variable interests.
And Maduro, the mustachioed Nicolas Maduro? After all, the United States has been complicit with Saudi Arabia since it sent the old British imperialism into retirement. But the caudillo of Caracas, the companion president, the last obstinate perturbator of the backyard with his messianic-third world thugs, the friend of Russians and Iranians? Washington offered the $ 15 million bounty to anyone who caught him accused of drug trafficking and industrial cleanup of filthy money. As late as January Biden proclaimed that Maduro was “an extraordinary threat to the security of the United States.” And now? For just a little more oil, the sanctions that have besieged it since 2019 will be eased. How not to purr an autocrat who has some of the largest crude oil reserves in the world, so far forced to sell it clandestinely and who could quickly double production to 1.5 million barrels a day? One cannot do without him “to contribute to the stability of the world“. One hundred days ago, the Caudillo supported Putin with the sword against “Yankee imperialism”. Now his deputy, Rodriguez, says that “Venezuela will never be in the field of warmongers at all costs” and will contribute to the defense of human rights. A handshake is enough to clean up.