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.
