How they see us: Collective sigh of relief at Biden win
The world “will no longer have to twitch over the U.S. president’s Twitter feed,” said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer (U.K.). When the news broke last week that Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump in the race for the White House, many Europeans couldn’t help but cheer. They were right to celebrate: The past four years have been a disaster for transatlantic relations, with President Trump trashing NATO, berating European leaders, and pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal, which was painstakingly negotiated by the U.S. and the European Union. The Trump presidency so thoroughly gutted U.S. prestige that “liberal democracies lost their faith in American leadership.” Few could stomach the thought of a second term. That’s why ecstatic European officials were among the first to extend congratulations to the new president-elect, said Piotr Smolar in Le Monde (France). Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin invited Biden—who has Irish ancestry—to visit, Chancellor Angela Merkel called the U.S.-German friendship “irreplaceable,” and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo tweeted, “Welcome back, America!” They want to see a new president take tangible steps to repair the breach, such as rejoining the Paris climate change agreement. The transatlantic alliance has to be “rebalanced.”
Yet a lot has changed in the past four years, said Stefan Kornelius in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). Forced to imagine a world in which the protection of the U.S. military wasn’t guaranteed, Europe began “taking the first steps toward foreign policy independence.” French President Emmanuel Macron went furthest, urging the Continent to achieve “strategic autonomy” from America. While most EU nations still want close ties with the U.S., the Trump era compels us to ask just “how overpowering is the American isolationist desire?” Will the U.S. honor existing treaties and alliances? We need to accept that the real America and the America of our dreams are two very different places, said Ernesto Galli della Loggia in Corriere della Sera (Italy). The 70 million people who voted for Trump last week are “convinced that freedom essentially means only one thing: being able to do whatever you want.” This “anarchic individualism” is alien to Europeans, who value communality and compromise. And it bodes ill for American freedom in the long run, since “democracy functions best only where the large majority of citizens share a culture and values compatible with it.”
It’s frankly terrifying that Trump came so close to a second term, said Didier Fassin in Libération (France). If you put aside his ranting, grifting, and “pathological narcissism” and just look at the policies, you see “a brutal form of nationalist populism that is fed by white supremacism and reliant on big corporations.” It’s about keeping women and blacks down and Muslims and Mexicans out—and letting the rich get richer. Yet somehow, the majority of American men, the majority of whites, and the majority of Christians once again supported all this. Europeans now know that the U.S. is just one election away from ultraright authoritarianism. We’ll never be able to look at America the same way.