Four years ago, Europe’s politicians woke up on the morning after Election Day in the United States to learn that Americans elected someone with a wholly unpredictable foreign policy to be their next president. Fast forward to today, and many of those same European politicians are now taking a big breath of relief that their four-year Trump nightmare is over.
But if the continent thinks Trump was simply a short-term aberration in what is an otherwise rosy U.S.-European relationship or that ties will automatically go back to the pre-2017 status quo, it will be sorely mistaken. Joe Biden may be a Europeanist at heart — he did, after all, run point on much of the Obama administration’s Europe policy and has solidified personal relationships throughout his decades of public life. But in about two months, Biden will be responsible for safeguarding America’s national security interests.
With respect to U.S. policy in Europe, that means ensuring Uncle Sam isn’t taken for a ride. Ironically, this is the very same concern President Trump was browbeating into Brussels, Berlin, and Paris throughout his presidency.
European officials have high expectations for a Biden presidency. After suffering verbal abuse from Trump all these years, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was outright giddy about Biden’s presidential victory and called him a man who “has a great deal of experience with Germany and Europe.” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas is anticipating more active U.S. coordination with Europe on a whole range of subjects, from China and trade to migration and the coronavirus pandemic. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hopes the incoming Biden administration will bring Washington back into the accords and institutions Trump left behind, including the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization. Biden’s foreign policy team has already expressed their intention to do precisely that.
Yet alliances aren’t one-way streets. Nor are they designed to be immovable, sacrosanct structures protected from criticism and reform. The U.S. may be the senior partner in the relationship, but that seniority has rarely been used as leverage to accomplish goals that would serve the national security interests of both sides. One of those interests is greater autonomy for Europe overall, where the continent not only makes decisions for itself but contributes far more responsibility for its own defense than it has historically. The benefits are clear for both sides: Europeans get freedom to chart their own course in foreign relations (assuming they can agree among themselves), and the U.S. retains critical alliance relationships without having to sustain its role as Europe’s first line of defense.
Some will make the argument that this sounds a lot like the old Trump policy. But this wouldn’t be an accurate assessment.
Trump made a lot of noise during NATO meetings about the European leaders fiddling around and ripping off the taxpayers while the U.S. did most of the work. But Trump wasn’t concerned as much with what they did than with how much money they spent on their defense budgets. In Trump’s mind, the numbers and financial contributions were more important than whether Europe was able to transform itself into a real U.S. security partner. European governments may be slowly padding their militaries with extra cash (NATO-Europe and Canada increased their defense expenditures by a combined $36 billion during the Trump presidency), but Europe’s overall military capacity is still unimpressive.
Biden pledged during the campaign that one of his first acts as president would be to call Washington’s allies and tell them, “America is back. You can count on us.”
He should follow up that introduction with a segue: “We also need to be able to count on you to do the right thing.”
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
