EU dreams of Biden era face first reality check
Change of US president next month offers Europe both possibilities and potential headaches
Joe Biden says the US is back and ready to lead the world. The EU is glad to see the president-elect — but it doesn’t want to be merely a follower.
This is the transatlantic conundrum with which top EU officials will have to grapple this week. Foreign ministers meet on Monday and leaders from Thursday to plot how to reset the troubled alliance, once President Donald Trump leaves office next month.
The talks promise to be something of a reality check on what many European diplomats agree is the undoubted opportunity created by Mr Biden’s arrival. The transatlantic relationship is widely seen as having become more tense in ways that will outlast Mr Trump’s open antipathy towards the EU.
Mr Biden’s election win last month sparked a flurry of hopeful papers and speeches from EU institutions. These seek to capitalise on the new US administration’s stated intent to rejoin the multilateral fray in areas from global warming to world health.
The EU wants to ally with the US to take a “once-in-a-generation” chance to boost global co-operation and tackle the “strategic challenge” of China, according to a paper published last week by the European Commission and the bloc’s diplomatic service. The two transatlantic powers must “join forces to shape the international agenda”, said a separate document circulated by the European Council team of Charles Michel.
Yet even these diplomatic love letters are laced with a sharp perfume of demands and looming discord. The commission paper nods to potential disagreements over China, reflecting how Washington’s approach is still likely to be more hawkish across the board than the EU’s.
The council document speaks of the transatlantic powers as “equal partners”. That may not be how Mr Biden’s team sees it, since Washington’s military might remains the ultimate guarantor of Europe’s security.
Further possible flashpoints in areas including trade, data privacy and big tech taxation are clear from a speech by commission president Ursula von der Leyen last month. She warned EU ambassadors that “some shifts in priorities and perceptions run much deeper than one politician or administration” and would not “disappear because of one election”.
The imminent change of leadership in the US has also highlighted the 27-member EU’s difficulties in presenting a united front. It comes as some deep — and highly relevant — internal divisions in the bloc have flared up.
One is the neuralgic — if often ill-defined — debate over whether the EU should build more “strategic autonomy”. The push, led by Paris, disconcerts some more transatlanticist member states that see it as distancing Europe from the US.
The EU also faces a showdown over the slide towards autocracy in some member states. Hungary and Poland are currently stalling a plan to curb EU funding for countries that breach the law. The dispute could complicate European participation in Mr Biden’s push for an international alliance of democratic countries.
For many European diplomats, Mr Trump’s departure on January 20 cannot come soon enough. The question is whether EU dreams for a Biden presidency will survive contact with the actuality of it.