» Biden’s first overseas trip aims to mend ties.
MILDENHALL, England — President Joe Biden opened the first overseas trip of his term Wednesday with a declaration that “the United States is back” as he seeks to reassert the nation on the world stage and steady European allies deeply shaken by his predecessor.
Biden has set the stakes for his eight-day trip in sweeping terms, believing the West must publicly demonstrate it can compete economically with China as the world emerges from the coronavirus pandemic. It’s an open repudiation of his predecessor, Donald Trump, who scorned alliances and withdrew from a global climate change agreement that Biden has since rejoined.
The president’s first stop was a visit with U.S. troops and their families at Royal Air Force Mildenhall, where he laid out his mission for the trip.
“We’re going to make it clear that the United States is back and democracies are standing together to tackle the toughest challenges and issues that matter the most to our future,” he said. “That we’re committed to leading with strength, defending our values, and delivering for our people.”
The challenges awaiting Biden overseas were clear as the president and the audience wore masks — a reminder of the pandemic still raging around much of the world even as its threat recedes in the United States.
“We have to end COVID-19 not just at home — which we’re doing — but everywhere,” Biden said.
After addressing the troops, Biden and first lady Jill Biden flew to Cornwall for a summit of the Group of Seven leaders.
Building toward his tripending summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden will aim to reassure European capitals that the United States once again can be counted on as a dependable partner to thwart Moscow’s aggression both on their eastern front and their internet battlefields.
The trip will be far more about messaging than actions or deals. And the top priority for Biden is to show the world that his Democratic administration isn’t just a fleeting deviation in the trajectory of an American foreign policy that many allies fear irrevocably drifted toward a more transactional outlook under former President Donald Trump.
“The trip, at its core, will advance the fundamental thrust of Joe Biden’s foreign policy, to rally the world’s democracies to tackle the great challenges of our time,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said.
Biden’s to-do list is ambitious.
In their face-to-face sitdown in Geneva, Biden wants to privately pressure Putin to end myriad provocations, including cybersecurity attacks on American businesses by Russian-based hackers, the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and repeated overt and covert efforts by the Kremlin to interfere in U.S. elections.
Biden also is looking to rally allies on their COVID-19 response and to urge them to coalesce around a strategy to check emerging economic and national security competitor China even as the U.S. expresses concern about Europe’s economic links to Moscow.
Biden also wants to nudge outlying allies, including Australia, to make more aggressive commitments to the worldwide effort to curb global warming.
The week-plus journey is a big moment for Biden, who traveled the world for decades as vice president and as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and stepped off Air Force One onto international soil as commander in chief for the first time.
Throughout his trip, Biden will be facing world leaders still grappling with the coronavirus and rattled by four years of Trump’s inward-looking foreign policy and moves that strained longtime alliances as the Republican former president made overtures to strongmen.
“In this moment of global uncertainty, as the world still grapples with a once-ina-century pandemic,” Biden wrote in a Washington Post op-ed previewing his diplomatic efforts, “this trip is about realizing America’s renewed commitment to our allies and partners, and demonstrating the capacity of democracies to both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age.”
Central and Eastern Europeans are desperately hoping to bind the U.S. more tightly to their security. Germany is looking to see the U.S. troop presence maintained there so it doesn’t need to build up its own. France, meanwhile, has taken the tack that the U.S. can’t be trusted as it once was and that the European Union must pursue greater strategic autonomy going forward.
“I think the concern is real that the Trumpian tendencies in the U.S. could return full bore in the midterms or in the next presidential election,” said Alexander Vershbow, a former U.S. diplomat and ex-deputy secretary general of NATO.
The sequencing of the trip is deliberate: Biden will consult with Western European allies for much of a week as a show of unity before his summit with Putin.
On Thursday he’ll sit down with British Prime Minster Boris Johnson, a day ahead of the Friday-Saturday G-7 summit. On Sunday, he’ll meet with Queen Elizabeth II before heading to Brussels for a NATO summit Monday and a meeting with the heads of the European Union on Tuesday.
There are several potential areas of tension. On climate change, the U.S. is aiming to regain its credibility after Trump pulled the country back from the fight against global warming. Biden also could feel pressure on trade, an issue to which he’s yet to give much attention.
And with the United States well supplied with COVID-19 vaccines yet struggling to persuade some of its own citizens to use it, leaders whose inoculation campaigns have been slower surely will pressure Biden to share more surplus around the globe beyond the donation of 500 million Pfizer doses to 92 lower income countries and the African Union that he’ll formally announce Thursday.
Another central focus will be China. Biden and the other G-7 leaders will announce an infrastructure financing program for developing countries meant to compete with Beijing’s Belt-and-Road Initiative. But not every European power has viewed China in as harsh a light as Biden, who has painted the rivalry with Beijing as the defining competition for the 21st century.
The European Union has avoided taking as strong a stance on China’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s democracy movement or treatment of Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the western Xinjiang province as the Biden administration may like. But there are signs Europe is willing to put greater scrutiny on Beijing.
The EU in March announced sanctions targeting four Chinese officials involved with human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Beijing, in turn, responded by imposing sanctions on several members of the European Parliament and other Europeans critical of the Chinese Communist Party.
Biden is also scheduled to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan while in Brussels, a face-to-face meeting between two leaders who have had many fraught moments in their relationship over the years.
Biden waited until April to call Erdogan for the first time as president. In that call, he informed the Turkish leader that he would formally recognize that the systematic killings and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by Ottoman Empire forces in the early 20th century were “genocide” — using a term for the atrocities that his White House predecessors had avoided for decades over concerns of alienating Turkey.
The trip finale will be Biden’s meeting with Putin.
“By and large, these are not meetings on outcomes, these are ‘get to know you again’ meetings for the U.S. and Europe,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s about delivering a message to Putin, to reviving old alliances, and to demonstrate again that the U.S. is back on the right course.”