FALMOUTH, England – Few pictures have captured the rupture of the transatlantic relationship better than that of President Donald J. Trump in 2018, arms crossed over his chest, as he saw Chancellor Angela Merkel and other frustrated leaders in their doomed endeavors the rescue of their summit resisted in Canada.
When the same leaders meet again in Cornwall, England on Friday, President Biden will reverse body language and replace stagnation with hug. But below the pictures, it’s not clear how much more open the United States will be to Europe than it was under Trump.
The transatlantic partnership has always been less reciprocal than its proponents like to claim – a marriage in which one partner, the United States, held the nuclear umbrella. Now that China is overtaking the Soviet Union as America’s arch-rival, the two sides are less united than they were during the Cold War, a geopolitical shift that exposes longstanding tensions between them.
At the reunification of the group of 7 industrialized nations on Friday, the question arises: will this expression of solidarity be more than a diplomatic pantomime – reassuring for Europeans who are traumatized by Trump’s “America First” policy, but have to disappoint them if they do realize that? does the United States go its own way under Mr Biden?
“America’s foreign policy has not fundamentally changed,” said Tom Tugendhat, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the UK Parliament. “It’s more collaborative and inclusive, but essentially it’s the same.”
“Like all leaders,” he added, “Biden puts his own country first. How he achieved this distracted many. “
Few Europeans question the sincerity of his efforts. Even more than his former boss, Barack Obama, Mr Biden is an Atlanticist who has been involved in European affairs from the Balkans to Belfast for decades.
On Thursday he and Prime Minister Boris Johnson presented a new Atlantic Charter based on the post-World War II draft signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
In their first face-to-face meeting, Mr Biden and Mr Johnson each projected unity, each promising that his country would provide hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine to the developing world.
“I will not contradict the President in this or anything,” said Mr Johnson after Mr Biden said that both he and the newlywed Prime Minister “got married over our station.”
But the president has made China the guiding star of his foreign policy more aggressive. While American officials seek European support for these efforts, analysts said their expectations are limited given the commercial interests of Germany and other countries and the fact that Ms. Merkel and other Europeans showed no appetite for a new Cold War with Beijing.
“The Biden administration is determined to be courteous, determined to hear them, and then they will do whatever it was up to,” said Jeremy Shapiro, who worked at the State Department during the Obama administration and is now the European Council’s director of research for foreign relations in London.
“It doesn’t matter what US policy is towards Europe,” said Shapiro, summing up the prevailing opinion in the government. “We’re going to get the same amount out of them in China.”
The skepticism goes in both directions. Many European officials view Mr. Biden’s statement that “America is back” with a yellowish look, even if it is well-intentioned, in the face of the attack on the US Capitol and other threats to American democracy, not to mention Mr. Trump’s iron influence on the Republican Party.
“We live in an era of loss of confidence,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to the United States who chairs the Munich Security Conference, at which Biden was a regular speaker.
The Germans used to think that the transatlantic alliance didn’t care much whether the president was a Democrat or a Republican. Now Ischinger said: “For the first time in 70 years we are confronted with a new question: What happens when a resurrected Trump appears on the stage?”
White House officials have carefully choreographed Mr Biden’s trip to make it a summer festival of Alliance repair. But back in Washington, analysts say its staff moves show a marginalized role for Europe.
Biden in Europe
Updated
June 10, 2021, 8:08 p.m. ET
The White House has appointed prominent officials to coordinate Indo-Pacific and Middle Eastern politics in the National Security Council. There is no equivalent for Europe, nor has the government made diplomatic appointments such as a NATO ambassador or an envoy for Northern Ireland.
Mr Biden has welcomed the leaders of Japan and South Korea to the White House, but has not yet welcomed a major European leader.
On the eve of his visit to the UK, a senior American diplomat spoke bluntly to Johnson’s chief negotiator for Brexit about how the UK is handling tensions over post-Brexit trade deals in Northern Ireland.
There is a similar sense of limited expectations of Russia on both sides, even if Mr Biden meets President Vladimir V. Putin in Geneva next week. Washington-Moscow relations quickly deteriorated in the early months of the administration as the United States faced a Russian hacking operation, evidence of continued Russian interference in the 2020 presidential campaign, and Putin’s masses of troops on Russia’s border with Ukraine.
Russia’s arrest of opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny three days before Mr Biden’s inauguration set the tone for tensions to come.
Far from the “reset button” that Mr. Biden announced during his tenure as Vice President of Mr. Obama in 2009, his meeting with Mr. Putin appears to be primarily aimed at suppressing tensions with what is usually a divided Russia, so that both sides can use it avoid conflicts that could disrupt Mr Biden’s domestic political agenda.
Given what analysts are saying, Mr Putin’s calculation is that Russia will benefit from instability by sowing, they question how successful Mr Biden will be. Europe’s proximity to Russia – and Germany’s dependence on its natural gas – means that instability would pose a greater threat to Europe than it does to the United States.
“The problem with China is that it’s not our neighbor, it’s the US neighbor,” said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a think tank in London. “Russia is Europe’s neighbor, and that reality complicates it, but only to the extent that the US wants to raise the temperature.”
The government’s zigzag course on Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline that runs from Russia to Germany, has left some in Europe scratching their heads. Foreign Minister Antony J. Blinken said Mr. Biden publicly rejected the pipeline as a “bad idea”. But Mr Blinken recently declined to impose sanctions on those behind the $ 11 billion project, saying its conclusion was a “fait accompli”.
The reversal on the eve of Mr Biden’s European tour seemed designed to avoid a break with Germany, a critical ally. But in Britain, which is cracking down on Russia tougher than Germany, some officials said they were concerned that the decision would encourage Mr Putin and weaken Ukraine’s eastern border.
While the transatlantic differences with China are substantial, officials on both sides say Europe is gradually moving in Mr Biden’s direction. The European Parliament held up the ratification of a landmark investment treaty between Brussels and Beijing last month. This followed Beijing’s sanctioning of ten European Union politicians in what Europeans thought was an exaggerated reaction to the sanctions China had imposed for imprisoning Uighur minorities in Xinjiang.
The UK has leaned on the US on China, restricting Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei’s access to its 5G network. However, analysts warn that the change is motivated less by a change of heart about Beijing than by a desire not to get out of step with its most important ally after Brexit.
Some in Europe argue that Mr. Biden’s China policy is not fully worked out, noting that there was no shortage of diplomatic pantomime at Mr. Blinken’s stormy meeting with Chinese officials in Alaska in March.
Europe’s views could also develop further with the departure of Ms. Merkel, who firmly believes in a commitment to China, after 16 years in office and with French President Emmanuel Macron, who faces a difficult election campaign next year.
“The EU’s position on China has hardened over human rights issues,” said Simon Fraser, a former senior official in the UK Foreign Office. “I suspect there is a lot in common, even if different national interests come into play.”
Still, some Europeans have been put off by the way Mr Biden has portrayed competition with China in stark ideological terms – a fateful battle between democracy and autocracy in which the autocrats could win.
For leaders like Ms. Merkel, whose land sells millions of Volkswagen and BMW in China, the relationship is driven by trade and technology, not a possible military clash in the South China Sea.
“There’s a profound psychological problem at play,” said Thomas Wright, director of the Center on Europe and the United States at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Some Europeans believe the US is too nostalgic for the Cold War and too ready to return.”
These are, of course, the early days of Mr Biden’s presidency. Analysts said he had recalibrated his message on China and Russia two months ago when he told Congress that Chinese President Xi Jinping believed that “democracy cannot compete with autocracies in the 21st century.”
Charles A. Kupchan, a Georgetown University professor who worked in the Obama administration on European affairs, said Mr Biden’s goal was to prevent the creation of a Sino-Russian bloc against the West. That requires the help of allies, which is why he predicted that Mr. Biden would not only listen to Europeans, but would also listen.
“This attempt to find geopolitical dividing lines will not find much support from the American allies,” said Kupchan.
Mr Biden appears to be sensitive to these concerns. In a column in the Washington Post last Sunday in which he outlined his travel destinations, he refrained from militant references to an autocratic China. Instead, he wrote about whether the United States and its allies might face a poor challenge: “Can democracies come together to deliver real results for our people in a rapidly changing world?”
