Europe wonders if it can rely on US again
America’s polarised politics have marked its foreign policy in EU. By Steven Erlanger
Treated with contempt by President Donald Trump, who considers them rivals and deadbeats instead of allies, many European leaders look forward to the possibility of a Biden presidency. But they are painfully aware that four years of Mr Trump have changed the world — and the United States — in ways that will not be easily reversed.
Even if civility can be restored, a fundamental trust has been broken, and many European diplomats and experts believe that US foreign policy is no longer bipartisan, so is no longer reliable. “The shining city on the hill is not as shining as it used to be,” Reinhard Butikofer, a prominent German member of the European Parliament, put it bluntly.
For the first time, said Ivan Krastev, director of the Center for Liberal Strategies, “Europeans are afraid that there is no longer a foreign-policy consensus in the US. Every new administration can mean a totally new policy, and for them this is a nightmare.”
The ideological divide was on display on Thursday, when Mr Trump and Joe Biden held their final presidential debate. There will be what most consider low-hanging fruit for the likely Biden administration that will please Europeans. The crop includes an extension to New START, the nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, and returns to the Paris climate accord, the World Health Organization and even the Iran nuclear accord. There will be feel-good meetings and statements about multilateralism, less confrontation about trade, renewed efforts to reform the World Trade Organization and a less combative atmosphere at summits of the G7 and Nato.
But Mr Trump’s complaints are shared by many Americans, and given the polarisation in America, President Emmanuel Macron of France has pushed Europe to step up in an altered world, in which China is rising and the Trump administration is only a symptom of a US retreat 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, even if it is more aspiration than reality. Some, like Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs, and Francois Heisbourg, a French security analyst, fear that a Biden presidency could short-circuit European autonomy and let Europeans continue, as Ms Tocci said, “sticking our heads in the sand”.
A Trump re-election, of course, might accelerate the trend towards autonomy, even if few believe that Mr Trump would be able to pull out of Nato, as one of his former national security advisers, John Bolton, suggested he might.
US 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, too, was subject to deepening political polarisation in the United States.
“There is an incredible decay in Europe of the sense of the United States as a leader,” accelerated and symbolised by mishandling of the coronavirus, said Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“Biden doesn’t solve their America problem,” he said. “He’s not going to be president forever, and Democrats won’t always be in power, and people have learned that the US can’t be trusted on foreign policy, because the next administration will come in and wipe it away.”
The inconsistency of US foreign policy has undermined US credibility, some warned. There is “an American decline in geopolitical weight”, said Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University.
“The single fact that shapes the US role in global politics is polarisation, and this polarisation will not disappear if Joe Biden is elected,” he said. “Americans simply don’t agree with one another on basic premises, even on how much America should be involved in global affairs and Nato.”
William Burns, a former senior US diplomat who now runs the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, thinks the damage is lasting, no matter who wins the election.
“One of the more insidious effects of polarisation is to make foreign policy a tool of partisan politics,” he said. “It’s done enduring damage to America’s reputation in the world for being able to keep its word.”
While Europeans would see a Biden presidency “as a return to civilisation”, as Mr Heisbourg called it, a new partnership would come with demands for new obligations and commitments, especially on China.
After Mr Trump, however, there would also be a new wariness 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 at most last until the next election, you look at everything in a more contingent way,” he said.
Europeans see US confrontation with China as one of the few bipartisan issues that are driving US foreign policy and they are reluctant to be made a pawn or a playing card in that rivalry, given that China is Europe’s second-largest trading partner behind the US.
Opinion polls show that most Europeans do not want to take sides in some battle between Washington and Beijing. “We don’t see the China challenge the same way and we’re not the peer competitor,” said Rem Korteweg of the Clingendael Institute. There will also be continued pressure from Washington on Europeans to spend more on defence — one bipartisan demand that has not fractured.
Mr Trump successfully goaded the Europeans to spend more but Europeans were also reacting to a vacuum in trans-Atlantic leadership, doubts about Mr Trump’s commitment to collective security and his view of Europe as a burden and a competitor.
“I see European partners more assertive in saying that we disagree with US policies — that’s the healthier legacy left by Trump,” said Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer, director of the German Marshall Fund in Paris.
Before Mr Trump, those disagreements were rarely fundamental. “We had differences, but there was never a basic mistrust about having common views of the world,” said Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former prime minister of Norway, who has dealt with numerous American presidents of both parties. But over the past four years, she said, several European leaders “no longer take for granted that they can trust the US, even on basic things”.
For Mr Burns of the Carnegie Endowment, US global hegemony is over. He sees little US appetite “for grand foreign-policy crusades” and says: “We cannot return to 1949 or 1992 — or even 2016. The world has changed, and the trans-Atlantic relationship must change with it.”