Biden Goes to Brussels and Builds Front Against China, Russia

In many of these areas, the EU is plowing ahead into uncharted waters as it tries to build a legal framework to put into action the Paris Agreement's mandates to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming.

After four years of Trump and with its politics still roiled by partisan divides, the U.S. is both playing catch-up to the EU in many of these climate-driven regulatory areas but it may also hope to use the council to convince Europeans to accept its more libertarian free-market instincts.

The White House said the State Department, the Department of Commerce and the U.S. Trade Representative will be chairing the council. American officials said the council will help the U.S. and EU build a common front against what they say are China's unfair trade practices.

China's state-run, secretive and centrally managed model of capitalism has proven highly successful, lifting more than 800 million Chinese out of poverty and resulting in stunning growth rates, but it is increasingly viewed as based on unfair and undemocratic principles that leave global competitors at a disadvantage.

Biden also soothed relations with the EU by easing trade tensions and disputes that were fomented by Trump, who accused the EU of benefiting from unfair trade conditions. In 2018, Trump angered the EU when he slapped tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Europe on dubious national security grounds.

Trump also fueled a long-running dispute between aircraft giants Boeing and Airbus over illegal subsidies. The World Trade Organization has found both the U.S. and the EU provided illegal subsidies and there were fears of tit-for-tat tariffs.

On Tuesday, the EU and U.S. said they had reached an agreement to end the 16-year-long Boeing-Airbus dispute. Under the deal, the U.S. said it was suspending tariffs against Airbus for five years and that the EU also was backing down on tariffs. Additionally, the deal stipulates conditions for both aircraft giants to not cooperate with China and for both sides of the Atlantic to work against China's aircraft industry.

The White House added that it was backing off from pursuing tariffs on a slew of other EU products.

Tuesday concluded a remarkable few days for Biden's efforts to revive U.S.-EU relations ahead of his summit with Putin.

At the G-7 summit in England, he got Japan and European powers to take a strong stance against China over allegations of human rights abuses and to back a plan to rival China's global infrastructure program in poorer parts of the world by mustering funds from private markets to pay for climate-friendly infrastructure projects. As a bonus, Biden got them to back a U.S. demand for a new investigation into whether the devastating novel coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.

Next, Biden got the 30-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization to place China into its strategic thinking for the first time.

“When you add up three summits, the whole – we believe – will be greater than the sum of its parts,” the senior White House official said at the briefing. “It will be the United States rallying the world’s democracies around a tangible agenda to make real differences in the lives of the American people in terms of their health, their economic wellbeing, their physical security, and the planet that we live on.”

Still, it remains far from certain that Biden's strategy will pan out. Back in the U.S., the White House faces potential backlash to the president's dreams of the U.S. shouldering global responsibilities, such as assisting poor parts of the world through his infrastructure schemes, paying for a massive shift away from fossil fuels and policing the world at a time of great power rivalry.

Europeans, too, may wind up being much less eager than they now appear to follow the U.S. into a standoff with China. After the NATO summit, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel both clarified that they do not want to be hostile toward China.

And perhaps the biggest question mark hanging over this new U.S.-EU alliance against China is whether the next occupant of the White House will scuttle all the goodwill. Europeans are wary of the possibility that Trump or a Republican of his ilk will return to the White House and dash the bridge Biden is building now across the Atlantic.

At the same time, China too will retaliate and try to get Europeans to reconsider their anti-China stance.

On Tuesday, the China mission to the EU lashed out at the NATO communiqué labeling China a military challenge for the alliance.

“NATO is slandering China’s peaceful development and misjudging the international situation and its own role,” a spokesperson for China's diplomats in the EU said in a statement. “It represents a continuation of the Cold War mentality and bloc politics.”

The Chinese statement pointed out that China's annual military spending is much smaller than NATO's, or about $209 billion compared to $1.1 trillion by the 30 NATO nations. It said China's nuclear arsenal pales in comparison to that of the NATO powers. The U.S., the United Kingdom and France possess nuclear weapons.

Complicating matters for the U.S., in Europe many see China's rise not so much as a threat but as a force for good on the world stage, agreeing with China's own projection of itself as a peaceful nation whose military buildup is primarily a defensive tactic against American aggression.

“The people of the world can see clearly who has military bases all over the world and who is flexing muscles by sending aircraft carriers all over the world,” the Chinese statement said, referring to the plethora of U.S. military bases and recent move by the U.S. to send an aircraft carrier through disputed waters in the South China Sea.

It added that China will “follow very closely NATO’s strategic adjustment and its policy adjustment towards China” and “not sit by and do nothing” if NATO threatens China.

Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.

Follow @cainburdeau

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