BRUSSELS AND GENEVA — President Joe Biden took office on a mission to rehabilitate the country’s ties with Western Europe after the acrimony of former President Donald Trump’s tenure and rally the world’s leading democracies to counter a predatory Chinese Communist regime.
A week of transatlantic pageantry showed signs of progress on both fronts, but U.S. and European sources acknowledge a tension between those two goals. Disputes over the division of labor between NATO and the European Union — between a transatlantic alliance led by the United States and a continental bloc which features France as the premier military — forced China hawks within the security alliance to settle for a more modest agreement than they had sought in the months leading up to the summit.
“There probably should be a China debate [in NATO], and there should also be a China debate within the European Union,” said former NATO chief strategic policy analyst Stefanie Babst, who held that post from 1998 to 2020. “The French have been extremely reluctant to put this on the agenda.”
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has attempted to jumpstart that process in recent years with the support of U.S. officials and lawmakers in both parties. He orchestrated NATO’s first reference to China in a communique at the 2019 NATO Leaders Meeting, and the latest communique devoted three full paragraphs to Beijing.
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“China’s growing influence and international policies can present challenges that we need to address together as an alliance,” NATO agreed this week. “China’s stated ambitions and assertive behavior present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to Alliance security.”
Such rhetoric represents a “breakthrough” for an alliance founded to deter Moscow, as one European defense official emphasized, and Biden’s team celebrated the shift.
“I see a strategic convergence. I wouldn’t say it’s total, but it’s actually moving in that direction, not in the opposite direction,” a senior administration official told reporters in Geneva. “We felt very good about the substance, where we landed, and the forward motion that was launched at this summit, and that will carry us to the next one.”
Still, Stoltenberg’s team hoped for better in the months leading up to the summit. The former Norwegian prime minister formed an expert group to develop a to-do list for the alliance that was released in December. The allies acknowledged the report but set aside its key recommendations, such as the call for NATO to “infuse the China challenge throughout existing structures and consider establishing a consultative body to discuss all aspects of Allies’ security interests vis-à-vis China.”
The absence of such proposals was disheartening for alliance strategists who see China’s might as a pressing concern.
“It was a pretty lousy communique because it’s all over the place,” Babst said. “There are some nuggets in it, some good language, but there is also a lot of repetitive stuff.”
French President Emmanuel Macron seemed to give the reason for that omission, emphasizing, “NATO is an organization that concerns the North Atlantic, China has little to do with the North Atlantic” in remarks to reporters.
“It’s very important that we don’t scatter ourselves and that we don’t bias our relationship with China,” Macron said. “It is much larger than just the military issue. It is economic. It is strategic. It is about values. It is technological. And we should avoid distracting NATO, which already has many challenges.”
On the other hand, Macron appeared the next day alongside Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to condemn China’s use of economic sanctions to punish Australia for demanding an investigation into the origin of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I know you are on the front lines of tensions that can exist in the region, of threats, sometimes of intimidation, and I want to say again here how much we stand by your side,” Macron told Morrison, adding that “France remains to defending the balance in the Indo-Pacific region.”
Those two press appearances may be reconciled in Macron’s desire for European nations to gain “strategic autonomy” from the U.S. It is not difficult to find officials within the U.S. government and European allies who perceive the French leader as aggrandizing the EU at the expense of NATO.
Some officials see that motive in France’s veto of Stoltenberg’s plan as a substantial increase to NATO’s common budget, which is not to be confused with the defense spending pledges of each ally, and even his forceful response to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s bellicose approach to a maritime dispute with neighboring NATO ally Greece.
“Yes, Turkey is a troublemaker in its own right [for] NATO, but it seems to all of us that France was very happy to be able to have the opportunity to pick fights with Turkey and to exaggerate and exacerbate the divisions within NATO,” a defense official from another European country told the Washington Examiner, after applying the “troublemaker” label to France as well. “Instead of actually trying to heal the rift and bridge the gap, France has been very vigorous in exploiting them — presumably in order to weaken NATO.”
That criticism overstates the case, according to an American who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“They certainly don’t believe in weakening NATO, but they certainly want to see a bigger role taken on by the European Union, in national security and foreign affairs in general and foreign and the security of the European Union,” the senior U.S. official said. “The French have tried to assure us, and others, that their efforts to try to build strategic autonomy should be supplemental to NATO, and I haven’t seen or heard anything to the contrary.”
In fairness to Macron, officials and analysts around the alliance acknowledge that European allies — in some cases, even the EU itself — is better suited to perform some tasks than NATO. Babst, the former NATO strategist, cited military-to-military training programs as something that “the European Union could do much better” than NATO.
As it is, U.S. skepticism of EU defense initiatives seems apparent to European officials. Biden’s administration treats Josep Borrell, EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, as a counterpart for Secretary of State Antony Blinken. But EU officials believe he should be in dialogue with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as well.
The Biden team seemed wary in recent weeks of voicing too much support for European Union defense initiatives, according to another official from a European Union member state.
“Probably because they think that ‘strategic autonomy’ means that Europe will go further beyond NATO and that European defense will be … not complementary to NATO,” the official said.
The final version of the U.S.-EU joint statement acknowledged “the contribution EU security and defense initiatives can make to both European and Transatlantic security” and endorsed “robust NATO-EU cooperation.”
Babst hopes that comes to pass and quickly. NATO leaders just agreed to develop a new Strategic Concept for the alliance, but the European Union is already at work on what they call a Strategic Compass, which is scheduled for release in the spring of 2022 when France holds the rotating presidency of the EU council.
“Between the two organizations, there are a lot of glass ceilings, and there are a lot of political issues,” Babst said. “It would be ideal if capitals, including in Washington, would really start to persuade the French that NATO and the European Union could more or less work jointly on their strategy work because it entails the same issues … but who will speak to the French?”
“I hope somebody,” she said.
State Department officials announced Friday Blinken will meet Macron in Paris on June 25 “to discuss areas of cooperation, including global security and recovering from the pandemic.”
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“As [with] most things, nothing is flipping a light switch,” the first senior administration official told reporters in Geneva. “Do you have a clear road map, a clear plan, and clear, shared commitments? I think the answer is yes.”
