COMMENTS
Joe Biden has in a way traveled the wrong way, when he is now in Europe to meet European leaders. His goal is to unite the West in a new cold war of values. Against China, writes Morten Strand.
IN EUROPE: Joe Biden has landed in Europe, in Cornwall, on his first trip abroad as President of the United States. Photo: AP / NTB
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Internal comments: This is a comment. The commentary expresses the writer’s attitude.
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Joe Biden var when he was inaugurated as president the most experienced foreign politician who had ever moved into the White House. After stabilizing and repelling the pandemic, he is now on his first trip abroad as president. On his trip to Europe, he wants to emphasize the obvious, that he has a much broader and broader perspective on the world than his predecessor, Donald Trump. But Biden’s journey to Europe is in a way going in the wrong direction, because it is China that is first and foremost about. Not least in Europe.
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Trump’s gaze in the world was to declare trade war against China, while at the same time he mocked, ridiculed, and certainly confused his closest allies, in both East and West. At the same time, he declared victory in the trade war because farmers in the Midwest were allowed to export more soybeans and corn to China. Trump saw multinational institutions as a conspiracy against American power and influence, which he confused with his own boundless ego. Biden, on the other hand, has a completely different overview, and can therefore raise this gaze, and gather his closest allies in the challenge everyone sees coming. Biden wants to knock in the message that the West must now stand together on democratic values, and that China’s growth more than anything else challenges these values more than ever in the 50 years Biden has been a key American foreign politician.
Next to to rebuild the US economy after the state money pandemic in a new New Deal, it is to unite the West to stem China’s growing power Biden’s foremost task, as he himself defines it. But it is not just China’s growing economic and military power that Biden is concerned with. For him, it is to a large extent also a value struggle. Since becoming president, Biden has shown increasing concern about what China’s growth means. And as a leading foreign politician even when the Cold War was at its coldest, in the 1970s and 80s, he knows the value of having allies standing together. At the G-7 summit in England, the NATO summit in Brussels, and in the meetings with EU leaders, he will drum up the troops in what he hopes will be a diplomatic front that will stem China.
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The question is, does the West stand together? With its huge infrastructure program, One Belt, One Way, China has bought into European economies such as Italy and Greece. But in particular, they make their hoses green in new EU countries such as Hungary and Poland, and finance railways and ports. And when it comes to the EU’s largest country and economy, Germany, China is the country’s largest export market. Biden’s diplomacy is therefore needed to mobilize troops for democracy, not least after Trump’s diplomatic savagery led Chancellor Angela Merkel to conclude that Europe must now take responsibility for its own security, because Trump’s United States could not be trusted.
But the consciousness whether the challenge China is facing is also increasing in the EU. For the United States, China is now the country’s foremost “counterpart”, while the EU two years ago concluded that China is the union’s “strategic rival”. The difference in the choice of words matters. As one diplomatic observer puts it, “Europe does not like what China does, but the United States does not like what China is.” Again, the difference is significant. For the United States, China is gradually becoming an existential threat, very different from, but still not so completely different from, what the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.
The difference is that The Soviet Union was first and foremost a military opponent, which, unlike China, could not compete with the West economically. Forecasts say that China will be a larger economy than the United States in ten years, the Soviet Union was never close. The similarity is that China – with the authoritarian state capitalism – is an ideological challenge for the United States and the West, as the Soviet Union was at times. The problem is that China, because of its economic success, is a greater ideological challenge for the West than the Soviet Union was.
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Therefore, no one should misunderstand the mild form of the bite. It is a battle cry from Biden’s rostrum on his first trip abroad as president. For a few days he puts the political “madhouse” – since Trumpism is far from dead – Washington aside, and can concentrate on rational political players who are interested in cooperation, and to find sensible solutions. And Biden will be greeted in Europe by a deep feeling of joy and relief that Trump is no longer the President of the United States.
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