Biden heads to Europe to meet with allies, Putin in first international trip

WASHINGTON (SBG) — President Joe Biden’s first foreign trip as president—an eight-day visit to Europe that will bring him face-to-face with leaders of many allied nations and one prominent adversary—marks the biggest test yet of his promise to turn the page from the Trump era of “America First” unilateralism.

“The trip, at its core, will advance the fundamental thrust of Joe Biden’s foreign policy: to rally the world’s democracies to tackle the great challenges of our time,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Monday.

Biden is scheduled to meet with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson Thursday before attending a three-day G-7 summit in Cornwall over the weekend. He will then travel to Brussels for a NATO summit and meetings with European Union leaders. The trip closes with a one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva.

“In this moment of global uncertainty, as the world still grapples with a once-in-a-century pandemic, this trip is about realizing America’s renewed commitment to our allies and partners, and demonstrating the capacity of democracies to both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age,” Biden wrote in The Washington Post Saturday.

The president is set to depart Wednesday, just as Vice President Kamala Harris returns from her first international trip, which was dedicated to confronting the root causes of migration in Central America. After devoting the early months of his presidency to containing COVID-19 and advancing his domestic agenda, Biden’s approach to foreign policy—honed across four decades in the Senate and eight years as vice president—is suddenly in the spotlight.

“He’s been getting ready for 50 years,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday.

In his inaugural address in January, Biden spoke of reasserting the United States as “the leading force for good in the world.” Since taking office, he has often outlined a fundamental battle he sees taking place between democracy and autocracy and a need for the world’s democratic institutions to prove they can still work in the modern world.

“America is back,” European Council President Charles Michel told reporters in Brussels Monday, echoing a sentiment Biden has often expressed.

Biden is certain to get a warmer welcome from allies than his predecessor with his promise of a more traditional and less confrontational style of diplomacy after four rocky and unpredictable years. President Donald Trump often clashed with European leaders publicly and privately at international summits and cast doubt at times on U.S. commitments to multilateral coalitions.

“The damage that Trump did to the character of our alliances was deep-seated, and European leaders were stunned by the harsh criticism that Trump continually levied against them,” said Ash Jain, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former State Department official.

In his first four months in office, Biden rejoined the Paris climate agreement and launched an effort to salvage the Iran nuclear deal, bringing U.S. policies more in line with Europe. He has also spoken more positively of NATO and the European Union than Trump ever did.

“I think the purpose of the trip is to set the new tone of multilateralism and alliances in contrast to the Trump era,” said Thomas Schwartz, a professor of European studies at Vanderbilt University.

However, there will still be some tension in the air, and European leaders have already been disappointed by some of the new administration’s decisions. Biden has not yet named an ambassador to NATO or the European Union, and Europeans have grown frustrated that pandemic restrictions on travel to the U.S. remain in place, as well as some Trump tariffs.

The Biden administration shares Trump’s concerns about European nations not spending enough on defense. Disagreements are also likely to arise over confronting China on a number of fronts, which Biden appears to view as a more urgent imperative than his European counterparts.

“The Biden team has established a pattern of working with Europe in which, beneath the surface politeness, they pay fairly little attention to European concerns,” Jeremy Shapiro, director of research at the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a Politico op-ed last week.

Having a new president in the Oval Office could go a long way toward healing diplomatic rifts and improving perceptions of the U.S. abroad. Still, the national security adviser acknowledged Monday Biden would need to demonstrate his leadership through action.

“What I believe we will deliver just out of the G-7 alone, in addition to the other meetings he’s going to have on this trip, will show that the United States retains profound capacity to help rally the world’s democracies to solve big problems,” Sullivan said.

A poll of European views on U.S. global leadership released this week by the German Marshall Fund and the Bertelsmann Foundation indicated opinions of the U.S. have not improved much across nine countries since Biden took office. Disdain for the American response to the coronavirus pandemic remains strong, and that appears to be dampening faith in the U.S. as a reliable partner.

However, another survey conducted by Morning Consult for the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center in April found opinions of the U.S. in Britain, France, and Germany had steadily risen since mid-January, moving from net negatives under Trump to positive under Biden. Some concerns about the U.S. have not faded, but the poll showed renewed optimism about transatlantic policies.

Schwartz suggested the harm done to U.S.-Europe relations by Trump’s rhetoric might not have been as severe as some critics allege, and pressuring European nations to be more self-sufficient was not necessarily bad for them. The perception that Biden is cleaning up the diplomatic fallout of the Trump years benefits him politically, but divisions have been developing across the Atlantic since the end of the Cold War.

“It’s not as if there’s going to be some magic recreation of allied unity circa the 1940s,” Schwartz said.

Biden’s task is complicated by former President Trump’s continued prominence in Republican politics and the looming prospect of him running for the White House again. Anything Biden says about the value of multilateral alliances will be tempered by the recognition that Trump or one of the many GOP politicians who have adopted his agenda could be back in power in the near future.

“Biden himself can’t necessarily fix it,” said Garret Martin, co-director of the Transatlantic Policy Center at American University. “From the European perspective, what guarantee do they have that Trump isn’t going to come back in four or eight years?”

Officials expect Biden’s meetings in Cornwall and Brussels will yield several new initiatives, as well as reaffirming existing commitments to objectives like combating climate change and corruption. Top agenda items will include infrastructure financing for developing countries intended to compete with aid from China, discussions of updated rules for trade and technology, and a coordinated response to the threat posed by ransomware.

Ahead of the trip, G-7 finance ministers formally endorsed establishing a 15% minimum global corporate tax rate, a key priority for the Biden administration. That proposal is still far from becoming a reality, though, and it will be considered by G-20 leaders at a summit in July.

A joint communique is typically issued at the end of a G-7 summit in which leaders detail shared goals and highlight areas of agreement on major issues. Trump derailed a joint statement at the 2018 summit, criticizing allies’ positions on trade and defending his tariffs, but there is likely to be far less acrimony in Cornwall.

“There will be a G-7 statement after the summit this time, and I think it will demonstrate the U.S. is back in sync with democratic allies,” Jain said.

The Putin meeting has already proven controversial, but Biden aides have tried to set low expectations for the face-to-face sit-down in Geneva. They maintain the summit has value, even if it does not result in any concrete commitments, and they rejected the notion that inviting Putin to meet amounted to rewarding Russia’s bad behavior.

Sullivan argued Monday that President Biden is “the most effective, direct communicator of American values and priorities,” and having him speak directly with Putin is the best way for both countries to understand each other’s plans and address their differences. He also underscored the importance of the president spending nearly a week consulting with allies from Europe and the Indo-Pacific region beforehand.

“He will go into this meeting with the wind at his back,” Sullivan said.

The Putin faceoff will undoubtedly be less cordial than Trump’s first meeting with the Russian leader in Helsinki in 2018, and Biden faces many challenges in dealing with the Kremlin. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters after meeting with Biden Monday that he supports dialogue with Putin to manage a “difficult relationship” with Russia.

“Putin is no softie on this,” Schwartz said. “He’s going to bring up America’s problems, as well.”

While Trump was deferential to Putin personally, his administration frequently took a hard stance against Russian transgressions. Biden has already drawn some criticism for lifting sanctions against Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, so signaling strength to Putin will be important, and officials say Biden intends to deliver a stern warning against harboring hackers who target U.S. interests.

“I don’t think he needs to accomplish anything specific,” Martin said. “It takes two to tango and I don’t think Putin is particularly interested in constructive engagement with the U.S. either.”

As Biden speaks with world leaders in Europe, he will also be delivering an important message to a domestic audience. He has promised a foreign policy for the middle class, and these summits offer a chance to explain how his actions on the world stage related to the COVID-19 recovery, trade, and climate impact Americans.

“He wants to demonstrate that the alliances that the U.S. has been leading for decades are directly beneficial to ordinary Americans,” Jain said.