Biden seeks to reassure Europe, regain its trust

Speaking virtually to US allies, president notes ‘America is back’ and restoring its foreign policy

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden tried to reassure U.S. allies Friday that he is turning the page on his predecessor’s “America First” approach and restoring a foreign policy that values cooperation with the world’s major democracies to tackle global challenges.

In two virtual appearances before world leaders, his first as president, Biden emphasized that he is restoring and building on the Obama administration’s diplomatic achievements, including the 2015 multination nuclear deal with Iran and the Paris climate accord, and seeking to work together to contain threats from Russia and China.

“America is back. The trans-Atlantic alliance is back, and we are … looking forward together,” Biden declared to the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of world leaders to discuss international security.

Biden reaffirmed U.S. commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Article V, the mutual-defense promise among treaty members that has been a pillar of the postwar democratic order, but which former President Donald Trump only grudgingly embraced.

“I know the last few years have tested our trans-Atlantic relationship,” Biden said. “But the United States is determined … to reengage with Europe, to consult with you, to earn back our position of leadership.”

The president nonetheless faces a hard job persuading allies, many of whom are nervous about U.S. reliability, said James Townsend, a former deputy assistant secretary of Defense, now at the Center for a New American Security, a centrist Washington think tank.

“The big issue for Biden is trust, in the sense that a lot of allies are still not convinced where our politics are heading,” Townsend said. “So many of them are thinking, ‘Should we hedge because we don’t know if we can trust that the U.S. will say consistently what Biden is already saying?’”

The president asserted that democratic nations, by working together on the three urgent global challenges — the COVID-19 pandemic, economic instability and the climate crisis — would help avert another threat: the rise of autocratic governments.

“Our partnerships have endured and grown through the years because they are rooted in the richness of our shared democratic values. They’re not transactional. They’re not extractive,” Biden said, implicitly disavowing Trump’s world view and indifference to democratic values, which strained alliances and enabled adversaries.

The Biden administration had already signaled a break from Trump’s approach. Gone is Trump’s constant criticism that allies don’t pay their share of defense costs. Instead, U.S. officials publicly commend allies for having increased their spending since 2014 — when President Barack Obama brokered an agreement that they boost military budgets — but they firmly add that some countries still fall short.

With Japan, a frequent Trump target, the administration last week approved a one-year extension of an agreement on how much Tokyo contributes toward bases used by U.S. troops, quietly defusing an issue the former president had elevated into a major confrontation. Biden also halted plans to remove 12,000 troops from Germany, which Trump proposed in part to punish the country for not spending enough on its military.

Allies’ skepticism about U.S. reliability, reflecting a concern that Biden’s successors could return to a nationalist path, was evident Thursday in remarks by French President Emmanuel Macron. He renewed his call for European “strategic autonomy” from Washington, diverging from Biden’s support for a return to reliance on NATO.

“I am a defender of European sovereignty, of strategic autonomy, not because I’m against NATO or because I doubt our American friends, but because I am lucid on the state of the world,” Macron said in an interview with the Financial Times. “Europe cannot delegate its protection and the protection of its neighborhood to the USA.”

Such splits between Washington and Europe may widen if Biden pushes NATO members to take a more confrontational stance toward Beijing and Moscow. Many European governments favor softer approaches to both countries.

Nor will U.S. frustration likely abate at Europe’s go-slow approach to meeting NATO’s goal that each member spend at least 2% of its gross domestic product on its defense. Nine of the 30 NATO members will reach the target this year; three met it in 2014. But Germany and others still lag behind.

In earlier remarks to a separate virtual session of allies in the Group of Seven with leaders of the major industrialized nations, Biden announced a $4 billion U.S. investment in COVAX, a cooperative global vaccination effort that Trump spurned.