Insight
President Biden went to Europe, and all we got was …? by Ian Bond, 10 June 2021
Biden is America’s most Atlanticist president since Bill Clinton. Europe and the US will not see eye-to-eye on everything, but they should not waste this chance to strengthen their partnership. As Joe Biden begins his first trip to Europe as US president, US officials are keen to stress that he is a “true transatlanticist” with decades of experience of European affairs, and that his visit is a signal that “America is back to work with our closest allies”. But Biden’s NATO and EU colleagues should not get carried away. Biden is above all an American politician, whose primary goal is to look after the interests of his voters before Congressional elections in 2022 and the 2024 presidential election – an aim encapsulated in his phrase “foreign policy for the middle class”. Nor will his successors necessarily share his interest in Europe’s problems. Most European leaders were relieved when Biden beat Donald Trump in last year’s election: Trump’s mantra of ‘America first’ and his visceral hostility to the US’s international alliances and to multilateralism were an existential threat to Western unity and the institutions that had served Europe well since the Second World War. Certainly Biden’s positive attitude to the EU comes as a huge relief after Trump bracketed it with China as a hostile actor. But the new administration has yet to remove some of the irritants in EU-US relations, such as the tariffs on European steel and aluminium imposed – on spurious national security grounds – by Trump in 2018. Some of the industries that might be harmed by European competition are in swing states like Pennsylvania, vital to the Democratic Party’s chances in future elections. And the transition from Trump to Biden has not brought a solution to the long-running dispute over illegal subsidies to Airbus and Boeing – in which the WTO has given both sides the right to retaliate. Though the EU and US have agreed not to escalate their trade disputes with further tariffs, that does not mean that they have solved them. At NATO, as with trade policy, Biden has not been quite the antithesis of Trump that Europeans hoped for. If anything, Biden’s announcement of the total withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, made without any prior consultation with other allies who provide the majority of NATO troops in the country, caused even more irritation than Trump’s surprise withdrawal from northern Syria. Europeans hope that when US officials talk about NATO as the primary forum for transatlantic consultation, in future that will imply CER INSIGHT: President Biden went to Europe, and all we got was …? 10 June 2021
info@cer.EU | WWW.CER.EU
1