How Biden Let Europe Slip Away

"The Biden administration hasn't been good for the trans-Atlantic alliance. This might seem a surprising claim, given that Joe Biden's team and Kamala Harris's campaign have touted improved U.S.-European ties as their greatest foreign-policy achievement. To be sure, the administration has devoted greater attention to Europe than any other region and shifted U.S. policy toward European Union preferences on a range of issues, from the Iran nuclear deal to the Paris climate accord. But after 3 1/2 years, there is surprisingly little to show in tangible benefits for the U.S.

Take trade diplomacy. Mr. Biden's team insisted it would chart a new course with the EU after tit-for-tat tariff exchanges under Donald Trump. 

What we got instead was an incrementalist approach that has done little to address U.S. concerns about European protectionism while handing regulatory wins to Brussels and failing to create a unified front against Chinese mercantilism.

The centerpiece of the administration's approach was a new entity called the Trade and Technology Council. A brainchild of the European Commission, its nominal purpose was to compartmentalize areas for agreement after years of failed attempts to create a comprehensive trans-Atlantic free-trade agreement. By its very existence, the Trade and Technology Council favored Brussels because it took the EU's longstanding goal of regulatory convergence as a given and framed the agenda as a search for that convergence.

From the earliest meetings, it was apparent this wouldn't be a forum for achieving what is America's, and should be Europe's, top strategic aim in trade -- to end Chinese dumping and foil Beijing's efforts to dominate emerging technologies. Instead, the Trade and Technology Council has focused on scoring easy political wins like shared standards for powering electric vehicles and telecommunication projects in the developing world. Real problems -- such as electric-vehicle subsidies, the EU's new Digital Markets Act, and its carbon tax on U.S. imports -- were pushed to the sidelines.

Where Mr. Biden's commercial diplomacy has produced results, they've tended not to favor U.S. interests. Under the Trade and Technology Council's road map for artificial intelligence, Washington embraced Brussels' "risk-based approach" of placing up-front restrictions on new technologies before they've even been developed. This encumbers American innovators with constraints that Chinese counterparts don't have to worry about.

The administration also agreed to a global minimum tax, long sought by the EU, which penalizes U.S. companies while giving a pass to Chinese state-owned enterprises. 

An EU-U.S. data-privacy framework places new restrictions on U.S. intelligence-gathering while arguably giving Europeans greater protection than American citizens under U.S. law.

The Biden administration punted on the most contentious trade disputes. It negotiated a truce in the fight over aircraft subsidies and implemented a temporary quota system to replace Mr. Trump's tariffs on European steel and aluminum exports. Both are set to expire in early 2025 and will land in the lap of the next president.

Mr. Biden lambasted Mr. Trump for a supposedly soft approach to Russia -- and then sought the equivalent of an Obama-style "reset" with Russia. Mr. Biden waived sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, slow-rolled military aid to Ukraine, and pursued a presidential summit with Vladimir Putin while keeping Volodymyr Zelensky at arm's length. These moves, combined with the catastrophic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan -- which, as a recent House report found, left European allies high and dry -- probably helped convince Russian leaders that America is not serious in Ukraine.

After the the conflict started, many North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies increased defense spending. But the Biden administration did little to seize the best chance since the Cold War to institutionalize greater European seriousness about security. Germany is backtracking on its pledge without any apparent response from Washington.

Promises by Western European allies to move brigade-sized units to NATO's eastern flank -- so the U.S. can focus more on the Middle East and Asia -- have gone unfulfilled. A recent Center for Strategic and International Studies report found that NATO remains reliant on U.S. nuclear forces to "expel, not repel," an attack.

Energy security is also suffering. The Ukraine conflict was the Biden administration's chance to reorient Europe from Russian gas while boosting U.S. natural-gas exports. While making a show of promoting gas exports to Europe, the administration froze permitting for 17 liquefied natural-gas terminals and introduced domestic tax incentives that encourage the production of wind and solar over fossil fuels. While greenlighting Nord Stream 2, the largest conduit of carbon-emitting gas in modern European history, the administration helped kill the EastMed pipeline, which would have brought Israeli gas to Europe via Cyprus and Greece to alleviate the shortages created by sanctions on Russia.

The administration might say this list doesn't account for the good vibes between Mr. Biden and his European counterparts. But the love affair has mainly been with Brussels, Berlin and, to a lesser extent, Paris. It hasn't applied to the U.K. Mr. Biden halted talks on a U.S.-U.K. free-trade deal, tacitly backed the EU against the U.K. in talks over Northern Ireland, and helped engineer the defeat of London's preferred candidate for the NATO secretary-general job. The administration seemed to go out of its way, at least until the new Labour government was elected, to damage the special relationship.

Tilting toward EU positions hasn't gained the U.S. special favors in Brussels, and new disputes have taken root. EU leaders were incensed that the administration didn't consult them before subsidizing U.S. electric vehicles and other green technologies under the Inflation Reduction Act. As Mario Draghi's recent report to the commission makes clear, the discussion in Brussels now is about how to keep the U.S. from racing ahead in clean technologies. The result is likely to be dueling trans-Atlantic industrial policies that drive up prices across the West and make it harder to combine forces against China.

In trade, defense, energy and industrial policy, the Biden administration has missed opportunities. Mr. Biden's term coincided with a significant increase in Russian activity and Chinese preparation for war, which presented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to galvanize a more unified and capable Western alliance. Instead of capitalizing to improve U.S. and European security and prosperity, the Biden administration pursued near-term bonhomie and neglected policies to address the real dangers facing the West.

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Mr. Mitchell is a former assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs and a principal at the Marathon Initiative." [1]

1. How Biden Let Europe Slip Away. A. Wess Mitchell.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 18 Sep 2024: A.15.