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Yesterday, after election day in the US, while Donald Trump began to threaten calls and shake the streets, a coordination battery with the Union capitals left Brussels. The required order: do not proceed in any particular order, wait for the final results before speaking. Only the tweet from the Slovenian nationalist Janez Janša, Prime Minister of Melania Trump’s country, escaped, who was quick to acknowledge the victory to the outgoing president. Now the Union is waiting for the final results, but, from what European sources tell us, more than one calculation has already been made in the foreign ministries of the old continent.
The first is of a political nature. Without Trump in the White House, European sovereigns would be more alone, starting with the ‘semi unknown to the general public’ Janša, continuing with the Hungarian Viktor Orban, the Polish Jaroslaw Kaczynski, but above all Marine Le Pen under two years of the presidential elections of France in 2022. All the leaderships that would lose an international reference like Trump, important in a global and interconnected world.
And even Britain’s Boris Johnson would feel a little more alone, at the head of a Brexit born the same year as Trumpism, 2016, but destined to take place just as Trump ends his term. It is done, reasoning in European circles, and London is interested in reaching an agreement with the EU before the end of the year to leave the Union permanently, regardless of who is in the White House. Without Trump, the political umbrella of all practice will be missing, not that of new trade deals with Washington.
But in times of sovereign and nationalist tendencies that have so far crossed continents, international political coverage is important. Trump will also miss Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni. And perhaps also to Giuseppe Conte, who received the last and fundamental support of Trump to begin to be confirmed prime minister of the M5s-Pd government last year, after the failure of his first executive supported by M5s and Lega. Trump’s absence from the US presidency could even bring the M5s and Pd closer together, some political observers suggest, but the clique is needed on this.
Rather, at the European level, the dossiers on which the EU can count on greater cooperation from Washington in the event of Biden’s victory seem clear. First, the climate: the Democratic candidate has already announced that he wants to return the United States to the perimeter of the Paris accords renegade by Trump. And then Iran: Barack Obama did it, Trump undid the network of dialogue that now, with Biden as president, could be resumed, removing the EU from the shame of having to decide whether to apply sanctions or not.
With the Democratic president, a more serene relationship with Washington is expected, without the final tones of Trump, the threats of tariffs. Above all, it is the reflection in the Eurogroup, a Biden presidency could guarantee greater investments for the recovery of the US economy, also the engine of the EU. And we could count on more dialogue on the fight against the pandemic, the reform of the World Health Organization, the appointments to the leadership of the World Trade Organization.
But: there are ‘buts’.
In Europe, no one has any illusions: even if Obama’s deputy is elected to the White House, that does not mean that we go back to the Obama era. Impossible: the world has changed. And Obama was already less “European” than Bill Clinton. Obama was the first to ask European allies for greater contributions to NATO, aggressive Trump continued, ‘sleepy Joe’ will also follow.
On the other hand, Europe has now embarked on the path to achieve strategic autonomy. It intends, although with its phosological slowness, to assert its own sovereignty in digital and industrial matters. The motto ‘Make Europe strong again’, the motto of the German semester of the EU presidency, will remain a compass even when Germany ends its turn at the head of the Union at the end of the year.
In short, there is no going back on certain things. Not even such a drastic change in the White House, such as that between ‘loud’ Trump and ‘gentle’ Biden, would return the train of history.
For example, European diplomacy does not expect major changes in relations with China, which remains the first global competitor with the United States. While Russia remains a mystery, to be discovered. It is certainly not that, with Biden as president, Washington would approve the North Stream project, the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, which ended in controversy in the wake of the Navalny case. And there is no bet for a substantial change of approach towards Israel, after the signing of the Abrahamic agreements with the American leadership.
The eventual failure to reconfirm Trump in the White House would change the world political cycle, draining much of the water that in the last four years has fed anti-European, sovereign, right-wing nationalist movements. But it’s not surprising that, for now, it’s more Trump’s eventual absence than Biden’s eventual presence that inspires the forecasts. Without Trump as president of a country as influential as the United States, sovereignists would have a less fundamental megaphone. But in times of extreme inequality and a new pandemic crisis, they could still have fertile ground to grow, even if Biden doesn’t find the key (economic, cultural) to turn them off.
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