January 22, 2021 - 2:00pm
Following a peaceful transition of power in the imperial capital yesterday, local rulers are performing their traditional role of ingratiating themselves with the new order and repudiating any connection with the old regime. In Europe, the EU Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen thanked Biden for “the inspiring inaugural address and for the offer to cooperate,” promising that “Europe is ready for a fresh start.”
Certainly, on climate change and the Green New Deal, claimed priorities for both the Biden administration and the EU, there is much room for renewed cooperation. Yet in the broader sweep of foreign policy, America and Europe’s interests and worldviews are increasingly divergent, and while it may suit Europe’s spokespeople to blame the rift on Biden’s newly-departed predecessor, holding the alliance together will remain problematic.
A major new survey for the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank highlights the divergence. As its summary notes, “majorities in key member states now think the US political system is broken, that China will be more powerful than the US within a decade, and that Europeans cannot rely on the US to defend them.”
Furthermore:
Despite the lavish praise for the incoming Biden administration offered by Europe’s foreign policy commentariat, particularly Germany’s, the recent EU-China trade agreement, hurried through by Merkel before Biden’s inauguration, can be read as a political manifestation of this sentiment. By signing it, the EU has essentially recused itself from an active role in any confrontation between the two superpowers. The Biden administration is also no more likely to look fondly on Germany’s role in the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline from Russia than did the Trump administration, guaranteeing another flashpoint in transatlantic relations. Yesterday, Merkel reiterated her support for the pipeline.
The most important European critic of both strategic autonomy and Nordstream 2 is Poland, a nation firmly Atlanticist in orientation, and hostile to both Russia and China for historic and ideological reasons, yet which hitched its wagon too firmly to the Trump train for comfort. Despite its centrality to the NATO alliance, Poland’s ultra-Conservative Catholic government is a strong rhetorical critic of liberalism whose waning attachment to Western democratic norms causes alarm in liberal American circles. Indeed, the country may soon find itself at odds with a Biden administration keen to reassert the hold of both democracy and liberal values across the empire.
Biden has already singled out Poland’s “anti-LGBT zones” for criticism, and his recent remarks that “you see what’s happened in everything from Belarus to Poland to Hungary, and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world… [Trump] embraces all the thugs in the world,” have not been well received in the country.
Poland’s leaders will hope, then, that America’s realist desire to maintain its waning strategic hold over Europe will outbalance any liberal idealist urge to export the values of the Democratic Party to the continent’s east: yet whether hard-nosed imperial realpolitik will outcompete America’s growing domestic ideological fervour will depend on the course of events in the turbulent imperial metropole, and not the empire’s eastern marches.
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SubscribeIt’s a bigger conundrum for the EU. Germany and France in different ways taking an unbelievable gamble – way way bigger than Brexit ever was. The idea that they can remain neutral in the escalating power struggle between the US and China is plain bonkers.
Someone somewhere in Europe needs to decide which side their bread is buttered. Grow up and accept that they are either operating under the aegis of the US or they are an independent power – the third hegemon. If the EU wants to push forward narratives of itself as the third global hegemon, then they cannot possibly think that does not come with the attendant cost of paying for its own security. Peacenik narratives are only cheap when someone else is paying the bills.
And it’s the nature of the gamble Germany especially is taking, that’s shocking. Ironic considering the continual accusations of delusions of past grandeur against the UK through Brexit – I think the UK has a much more realistic assessment of it’s own position – strengths and weaknesses – than Germany and France. Germany is effectively gambling that the EU can walk the knife edge over the next decade without getting hurt – that ain’t gonna happen. There will be no outright war, but the the EU would lose out anyway – unrelenting pressure on every issue from both the US and China, because they have levers over you and you don’t over them, your people across the continent bought off with money or convictions – simply because the other sides are much richer, leakage of assets, theft, the family jewels slowly sold off, sudden cliff-edges for industries that are feeding you now that you think will go on forever, sudden downgrades to your currency and your rating, other nations no longer buying your debt, etc.
Good post. With regard to the second paragraph, perhaps the current spat between the EU and the UK about the diplomatic status of the EU ambassador to the UK is a way of forcing the EU’s hand, making it finally declare its nature. If it really is a state, then let’s call a spade a spade and face up to the consequences of that (probably including a major democratic backlash in a few member states).
It’s curious the Trump administration downgraded the EU’s diplomatic status, and Biden will reverse that, but the UK doesn’t want to follow suit. I imagine the UK is holding out for something it wants in return – or the US is covertly playing a double game, pressuring the EU via the UK for the China deal.
Concluding the investment agreement with China (CAI) was a bad move on Europe’s part. I find the argument that it was to demonstrate strategic autonomy on the EU’s part and a willingness to forge its own path independently of the USA misleading. Rather more, it shows:
– the EU does not consider itself to have any security interests in the Asia Pacific region.
– money and markets are more important to it than principles & human rights. How on earth the EU thinks people are going to take its overtures on European values seriously going forward is a mystery to me.
If the message is that the EU intends to remain neutral in any conflict that occurs between the US, Russia and/or China then the first question which pops into my head is: without any EU army, how could the EU behave otherwise in real terms (i.e. apart from chucking around the usual the empty phrases about solidarity)? Surely at this point only individual member states could declare their allegiances and act on them?
The desire to stand back and not get involved in any conflict seems like the embodiment of Germany’s national politics on a European level. Shying away from any active leadership role, just sitting there, content to be rich and getting richer. If there was any large conflict, it would be naive to think the EU could entirely escape its effects…and I’m pretty sure it would then seek to rely on the US again.
In the coming years, I expect the EU to make a big song and dance about being autonomous but it won’t amount to much more than talking and if/when the proverbial hits the fan, it will turn to the US. Having been snubbed with regard to a joint approach to China and labelled unreliable, the EU might find that the Americans aren’t so keen.
I’m surprised anyone took them seriously before. Western talk of human rights has always been hypocritical. One example: NATO attacked Yugoslavia in 1999, with the full support of the EU because it was fighting a counter-insurgency against the KLA in Kosovo with rather less vigour than NATO member Turkey was employing in its own war against the Kurds. Why was Serbia bad but Turkey good? Because Turkey was “one of us” and Serbia was a friend of Russia.
The Western powers use human rights as a stick to beat people they want to beat for strategic reasons. Then again, if they didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any.
Serbia was bad because they were sending gangs of criminals out into the country to set their neighbours on fire.
Truly risible post.
What’s so risible? Are you laughing at the fact that at the same time as the West were punishing Yugoslavia, NATO member and candidate for EU membership Turkey was suppressing ethnic conflict with far more violence and with far more casualties than anything that happened in Kosovo? In your book, do crimes not count if the criminals are wearing NATO uniforms? Ha ha ha, very funny.
Well, let’s see: Team Biden has already reneged on a deal with Canada, of all nations, putting thousands into unemployment in an act of extreme bad faith. If they’ll do that to the country next door, what might these folks do to nations across an ocean?
The European Council on Foreign Relations report included the following observation, “rather than aligning with Washington, they want their countries to stay neutral in a conflict between the US and Russia or China.” I suppose the shoe is now on the other foot for that was precisely the thinking behind US isolationism in the 1930s: leave us out of your military rivalries, but let us make money off everyone through trade.
It didn’t work out for us then, it’s not likely to work out for Europe today … if they wish to retain the freedoms they worked so hard to attain – freedoms at which China, Russia and Iran (among others) scoff. If the Europeans as a whole (meaning the various peoples rather than their elite decision makers) agrees with that “hands off” sentiment, then perhaps all their talk of universal norms of conduct was just that: cheap morally preening rhetoric.
Yet, history certainly suggests that freedom, to be kept, must be defended on occasion. Can it be that they have forgotten this lesson?
‘Yet, history certainly suggests that freedom, to be kept, must be defended on occasion. Can it be that they have forgotten this lesson?’
Yes, Europe’s leaders forgot this lesson a long time ago, not least because they do not really believe in freedom and see China as a model to emulate.
If the EU turns its back on the US, dismissing the role America has played in guaranteeing world trade for the last half century, who’s going to pay to keep the ship lanes open? It’s not going to be China is it?
Great op-ed from Aris. People should really take the trouble to read the link to Kafkadesk’s “Poland and Hungary angered by Joe Biden’s ‘totalitarian regimes” remark'”, which details just how insulting and unfair Biden’s comparison of the Polish and Hungarian leaders to Lukashenko was, and how much Trump did in his presidency to improve relations with Hungary and Poland.
I just finished reading the hugely disappointing “Battlegrounds” by Trump’s second National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster. McMaster, who strongly attacks the Nordstream 2 pipeline. He puts all the blame on Russia for the disruptions of natural gas supply using pipelines crossing Ukrainian territory, when the Ukrainians were also at fault. In fact, one of the reasons for Nordstream 2 was to have a pipeline that was not at the mercy of disputes between Russia and Ukraine. What was really scary was just how clueless McMaster was about even basic facts. He claims that Russia’s economy is the same size as Texas’s; it is 2.5 times larger, with a GDP per capita a sixth of America’s, when it is a little less than half as large. So Putin comes across as a Bond villain whose diabolical cleverness allows him to let Russia punch way above its weight, when the country is actually punching about where you would expect it to. Natural gas that Russia doesn’t sell to Germany may get sold to China. It is imbecilic for the US to want to cement a China-Russia alliance, but that is where American foreign policy seems to be headed.