Transatlantic turmoil is not over by Megan Ferrando and Luigi Scazzieri
The US might be ‘back’, but sources of friction with Europe persist. And in 2022, Europeans should expect an inward-looking America as Biden focuses on domestic issues prior to the mid-term elections. Europeans started 2021 with high hopes for the transatlantic relationship. After the acrimony and tantrums of the Trump era, President Biden held out the promise of a return to better times. America, as he put it, was "back". One year on, many European countries and the US agree on the importance of upholding democratic freedoms, international norms and multilateral institutions. They have, so far, managed to present a fairly united front in response to Russia’s threats of military action against Ukraine. Their views on China have converged, especially after Beijing responded to European sanctions linked to human rights violations with its own sanctions against MEPs and think-tanks. The investment agreement that the EU and China reached in 2020, to the US’s annoyance, stands little chance of being ratified. Under Biden, Washington has taken a more positive stance towards EU defence initiatives than it had done in the past. The EU and the US have launched a dedicated security and defence dialogue, and Washington is in the process of joining an EU project on easing physical and regulatory obstacles to moving military forces across the continent. The US is also set to conclude a co-operation agreement with the European Defence Agency, which could enable more defence industrial collaboration.
Although the EU and the US have given up hope of striking a free trade agreement, trade tensions have eased: last June they agreed to suspend for five years the retaliatory tariffs they had imposed during the protracted Boeing-Airbus subsidy dispute, and in October there was a deal to resolve the long-running dispute on steel and aluminium tariffs. The EU and the US have also established a Trade and Technology Council to co-operate on technology development and regulation, manufacturing and supply chains, and trade and investment issues. However, not all is well in the transatlantic relationship. First, Europeans have been disappointed by what they see as Biden’s lack of consultation with them on major decisions. Many allies felt that the way in which he decided on and executed the withdrawal from Afghanistan was unilateral, even though those allies did not have the will or ability to remain without the US, or to handle the Kabul airport evacuation alone. In September, the AUKUS submarine agreement infuriated France, intensifying Paris's interest in making Europe less dependent on an increasingly distracted US for its security. And as Russia threatened to invade Ukraine, many eastern EU states worried that Washington would negotiate with Russia without taking their concerns fully into account – although they were more worried by France’s calls for separate EU talks with Moscow.