(CN) — The election of Joe Biden to the White House is bringing a wave of relief to a Europe eager to see an end to the disorienting and disruptive era of Donald Trump and marks a potential shift away from Trump's inward-looking “America First” stance on the world stage.
After former Vice President Biden was declared the winner on Saturday, congratulations poured in from European Union and world leaders eager for the United States to return to its traditional leadership role. Biden's victory was cheered around the globe as a strike against anti-democratic authoritarians everywhere.
“It was a very good weekend,” said Sigge Lindhe, a Swedish technology consultant and author, in a telephone interview. “Trump was a big step backwards for America. He demonized science, the freedom of the media. These are the cornerstones of the human race.”
“The results really matter both for the EU, where I live now, and Russia, where I am from,” said Alexander Kozlov, a Russian native and computer programmer who's called Berlin home for nearly a decade.
The silence coming from certain world capitals also was telling. The leaders of China, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and Hungary were among the few to not congratulate Biden and his running mate, U.S. Senator Kamala Harris. Some of them were likely wary of upsetting Trump because he has not conceded the election to Biden. Also, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro are big fans of Trump's far-right nationalist rhetoric.
On foreign policy, the Biden administration is expected to both revert U.S. policy more to where it was during the Obama White House but also not diverge that much in key areas from where Trump has taken the U.S., such as aggressively confronting China, withdrawing from the Middle East, demanding the EU spend more on NATO defense and resisting free-trade deals.
Still, in Europe the relief is immense even though there is a growing sense an inexorable gap is opening up in the transatlantic alliance as the U.S. and EU drift apart politically because American interests are focused ever more squarely on Asia and its rivalry with China.
“We won't pick things up where we left off in 2016 when we left our common ground behind because the world has changed, the U.S. has changed and Europe has changed,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, according to a translation provided by Deutsche Welle, a German broadcaster.
But she was optimistic. “With Biden in the White House, the tone and the way we approach each other will be different, more positive, more constructive,” Von der Leyen said. “We'll be able to resume a dialogue, communicate, listen to each other and find common solutions.”
Biden's worldview aligns much more readily with that of the EU because he supports international institutions and advocates cooperation to solve global problems, foremost among them global warming. He has promised to rejoin the Paris climate agreement and proposes massive spending on renewable energy.
“The European Union has found for the last four years that the Trump administration has undermined multilateralism and Biden is a supporter of multilateralism,” said Michael Leigh, the academic director of European public policy at Johns Hopkins University's campus in Bologna, Italy, in a telephone interview.
He called the 27-member EU bloc “multilateral by definition” and “probably the strongest multilateral organization in the world.”
As such, he said the EU strongly believes in supporting other multilateral organizations such as the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump pulled out of the United Nations’ health agency, accusing it of being corrupted by China, and his administration has blocked the workings of the WTO. Biden has said he will rejoin the WHO.