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In recent days, the institutions of the European Union have taken the first steps in an attempt to repair relations with the United States, damaged by the four-year presidency of Donald Trump. Both the Commission and the Bureau of the European Council have published documents outlining a closer collaboration with the administration of future President Joe Biden, listing a series of issues on which we can reconstruct what in recent decades had been one of the stronger Western alliances.
“A strong transatlantic relationship between equal partners is essential for the security and prosperity of both the EU and the United States and for the promotion of a liberal world order,” reads the Council document, partially published by the Bed sheet.
In recent years, Trump has repeatedly called the European Union an enemy: both for electoral reasons – the base of the Republican Party has now shifted toward isolationist positions – and for political reasons. Indeed, Trump tended to frame relations with other countries only from a commercial point of view: and since the European Union and the United States have had some differences on the issue for some time, his administration has launched a small diplomatic and trade war against The EU, first appointing substantially unacceptable ambassadors in half of Europe, people chosen primarily for guaranteed loyalty and funding to Trump during the election campaign, and then imposing tariffs on European aluminum and steel, beginning in 2018.
For months, especially in the face of a possible re-election of Trump, they debated whether the European Union could acquire what experts call “strategic autonomy”: that is, if it could find a way to become a power less and less dependent on both allies. historians like the United States and adversarial partners like China. Both Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, the most powerful political leaders among European heads of government, had openly suggested it.
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However, recent positions suggest that European institutions prefer a more prudent path: trying to repair a relationship with historical allies.
Both the Commission document and the Council document hope that with Biden things will return to normal, or almost, that is, that the United States welcomes the European integration project, as it has done since World War II, and return to normal. Support the European Union in promoting multilateralism, that is, the collaboration of various states towards a common goal.
Some of Biden’s positions go in this direction. Already during the electoral campaign, the next president of the United States had announced, among other things, that the country will accept the Paris climate agreements and that it will remain in the World Health Organization. Biden, who is of Irish descent, also took a very firm stance on Brexit, explaining that his administration will not endorse any deal that includes a new physical barrier between Ireland and Northern Ireland and that it will work closely with the UK and the United Kingdom. the European Union.
European leaders also hope to persuade Biden to pass a reform of the World Trade Organization proposed two years ago by the European Union, which Trump had sidelined because of his skepticism towards the organization (for some time his administration has also blocked the appointments of its internal court).
But the new approach proposed by the European Union is not limited to greater coordination. In the Commission document, published in part by Financial times, and which should be examined at the next European Council on 10-11 December – a number of sectors are mentioned in which the European Union has long decided to commit itself and in which a Democrat-controlled White House certainly has a greater Sensitivity than current: the fight against climate change and deforestation, common rules for the protection of personal data, a shared effort to distribute the vaccine for COVID-19 around the world.
In its documents, the European Union has also included one of the few common features between Trump’s approach and that suggested by Biden in the election campaign: intransigence against China’s economic and social model. For example, the Commission document states that “as open democratic societies and market economies, the European Union and the United States agree on the strategic challenge posed by China’s increasing international aggression, even if they do not always agree. about the best way to deal with it. ”As if to say: let’s try to find a common approach, perhaps at a summit between Biden and the main institutional offices of the European Union, which the latter should propose to hold in person in the first half of 2021.
No one expects the differences that have developed over the years to disappear with the election of Biden. “Trump’s legacy also includes making trade deals an agenda item in the American public debate again,” he writes. Politician And this “means that strengthening business relationships with the Biden administration could be easier, but it will still involve complex negotiations.”
The trade surplus of the European Union vis-à-vis the United States, that is, the positive balance of goods traded between the two entities, traditionally favorable to the EU, has increased significantly in the last ten years to reach 170,000 million annually. In any case, Biden could try to lower it, for example by imposing new tariffs on European products, also to maintain the consensus of the states and sectors most affected by the trade agreements.
Then there are long-standing issues for which “there are no easy solutions,” as he sums up. Politician: for example, the mutually imposed duties, following a decision of the World Trade Organization, for the subsidies guaranteed by the two parties to Airbus and Boeing, the main aeronautical industries in Europe and the United States. Or the call digital tax, which several European countries have already adopted against US tech companies (Apple, Google and Microsoft) and which the Commission would like to resolve in the OECD (although there have been many obstacles so far).
However, the feeling is that with the gradual reopening of the world after the pandemic and the new approach of the Biden administration, a way can be found to work together again: “The feeling of many is that we must seize this opportunity to rediscover the values that we have in common, to promote change through a common project and without disunity, to accelerate and relaunch the objective of saving our fragile planet and revitalizing and reforming multilateralism ”, as he wrote some time ago in Politician the former president of the European Parliament, Pat Cox.
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