[ad_1]
BRUSSELS – Treated with contempt by President Trump, who sees them as rivals and vagrants rather than allies, many European leaders are hoping for the possibility of a Biden presidency. But they are painfully aware that four years of Trump have changed the world, and America, in a way that will not be easily reversed.
Even if courtesy can be restored, a fundamental trust has been broken, and many European diplomats and experts believe that America’s foreign policy is no longer bipartisan, thus unreliable. “The bright city on the hill is not as bright as it used to be,” Reinhard Bütikofer, a prominent German member of the European Parliament, said bluntly.
For the first time, said Ivan Krastev, director of the Center for Liberal Strategies, “Europeans fear that there is no longer a foreign policy consensus in the United States. Each new administration can mean a totally new policy, and for them this is a nightmare. “
The ideological divide will be on view Thursday, when Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. have their last presidential debate scheduled.
There will be what most consider ripe fruit for a Biden administration that will please Europeans. The harvest includes an extension of the New Start nuclear arms control treaty with Russia and returns to the Paris climate agreement, the World Health Organization, and even the Iran nuclear deal. There will be feel-good meetings and statements about multilateralism, less confrontation over trade, renewed efforts to reform the World Trade Organization, and a less combative atmosphere at the G-7 and NATO summits.
But Trump’s complaints are shared by many Americans, and given the polarization in the United States, President Emmanuel Macron of France has pushed Europe to step forward in an altered world, where China is on the rise and the Trump administration is just a symptom of a US withdrawal from global leadership, not the cause.
The idea of European “strategic autonomy”, of a Europe less dependent on Washington and with its own strong voice in the world, has been gaining ground, although it is more an aspiration than a reality.
Some, like Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs, and François Heisbourg, a French security analyst, fear that a Biden presidency could short-circuit European autonomy and allow Europeans to continue, as Tocci put it, “Sticking his head in the sand.”
A reelection of Trump, of course, could accelerate the trend toward autonomy, even if few believe that Trump could withdraw from NATO, as one of his former national security advisers John Bolton suggested might.
Stay up to date with Election 2020
American foreign policy was traditionally bipartisan: the old phrase that “politics stops at the water’s edge” had merit, especially during the Cold War. But the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that foreign policy was also subject to deepening political polarization in the United States.
“There is an incredible decline in Europe in the sense of the United States as a leader,” accelerated and symbolized by the mismanagement of the coronavirus, said Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“Biden does not solve his American problem,” he said. “He won’t be president forever, and the Democrats won’t always be in power, and people have learned that the United States cannot be trusted on foreign policy, because the next administration will come in and erase it.”
The inconsistency of US foreign policy has undermined US credibility, some have warned.
There is “an American decline in geopolitical weight,” said Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University. “The only fact that shapes America’s role in global politics is polarization, and this polarization will not go away if Joe Biden is elected,” he said. “Americans simply do not agree with each other on basic premises, including how much the United States should be involved in global affairs and NATO.”
William J. Burns, a former high-ranking US diplomat who now heads the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, believes the damage is long-lasting, no matter who wins the election.
“One of the most insidious effects of polarization is to make foreign policy a tool of partisan politics,” he said. “He has done lasting damage to America’s reputation in the world by keeping his word.”
While Europeans would view a Biden presidency “as a return to civilization,” as Heisbourg called it, a new partnership would come with demands for new obligations and commitments, especially in China.
After Trump, however, there would also be a new distrust and unwillingness to take big risks on the part of America’s allies, said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “If you know that whatever you’re doing will last until the next election, you look at everything in a more contingent way,” he said.
Europeans see the American confrontation with China as one of the few bipartisan issues that are driving American foreign policy, and Europeans are reluctant to become a pawn or playing card in that rivalry, given that China is the second largest trading partner. largest in Europe behind the United States. State.
Opinion polls show that most Europeans do not want to take sides in some battle between Washington and Beijing. “We do not see the challenge of China in the same way and we are not peer competitors,” said Rem Korteweg of the Clingendael Institute.
There will also be continued pressure from Washington on Europeans to spend more on defense, a bipartisan demand that has not been fractured.
Trump successfully incited Europeans to spend more. But Europeans were also reacting to a void in transatlantic leadership, doubts about Trump’s commitment to collective security and his vision of Europe as a burden and a competitor.
“I see the most assertive European partners saying that we do not agree with US policies, that is the healthiest legacy left by Trump,” said Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer, director of the German Marshall Fund in Paris.
Before Trump, those disagreements were rarely fundamental.
“We had differences, but there was never a basic mistrust in having common views of the world,” said Gro Harlem Brundtland, a former prime minister of Norway, who has dealt with numerous US presidents from both parties.
But over the past four years, he said, various European leaders “no longer take for granted that they can trust the United States, even in basic things.”
Confidence in Washington will not return quickly, he said. “While most European leaders think that it is better for the global system to rely on a close relationship between the United States and Europe,” he said, “having such a polarized situation between the two main US parties is scary, and one he wonders where he is going. “
For Burns of the Carnegie Endowment, America’s global hegemony is over. He sees little American appetite for “great foreign policy crusades” and says, “We can’t go back to 1949 or 1992, not even 2016. The world has changed and the transatlantic relationship must change with it.”
A Biden administration would focus first on internal renewal in a country hit by the coronavirus, he said. It would seek a more collaborative partnership with Europe, supporting “a European security identity that is not obtained at the expense of NATO.”
Europeans have “their own skepticism, given the drift they’ve seen in a more introspective America,” Burns said. But viable coalitions on China, 5G, Russia, Africa, and climate change are possible.
But Europeans must also compromise, Burns said. “Both parties must work hard to invest in a new relationship, which they have not always done in the past.”
