Europe and America are like an estranged couple– enjoy lost and the facility for the marital relationship fading into memory. Europeans might cheer a Biden’s success, but it will not eliminate irreconcilable distinctions and dysfunctions.
Biden will do the statecraft analog of relationship counseling– reenroll the United States in the WHO, stop blocking development in the WTO, and declare the Paris Climate Accord– to little avail.
The WTO lacks tools to resolve China’s mercantilism, and Beijing’s consent is required to write new rules– that’s not happening. We saw with COVID-19 that the WHO does its best work fronting for Chinese disinformation. Mr. Trump notwithstanding, the American economic sector has been cutting CO2 emissions quite nicely.
The EU is much richer and more populated than Russia, yet it must depend on the United States to safeguard it from Russian aggression. The United States faces a tremendous obstacle from China in Asia, and every dollar spent in NATO can’t be invested to prepare an overtaxed U.S. fleet for a face-off over Taiwan or in the South Pacific.
For the first time because of the War of 1812, the American military deals with the prospect of duking it out with an enemy that is more populated and will quickly have a bigger economy. And China enjoys the home-field advantage.
China can predict air power from its mainland bases, whereas the U.S. carrier fleet needs to turn implementations. U.S. military bases closest to Taiwan are vulnerable to Chinese rocket attacks. Without spending substantially more, the United States is looking down the barrel of a humiliation akin to Rome’s triumph over Carthage in the First Punic War– it established Rome as the preeminent sea power.
The Europeans will continue to be informed, quietly, they should increasingly face Russia with their own soldiers and rifles.
Germany prioritizes economic interests over national security, which in the end is the surest path to decadence, decay, and defeat. Russia’s gas is cheap however in the face of aggressiveness in Ukraine, President Putin’s poisoning of political rivals like Alexi Navalny, and other provocations, Germany will only back weak sanctions and still pursue the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Berlin would rather put hard cash into the pockets of the Russian military than purchase more pricey American LNG.
Important EU diplomacy choices require the consentaneous consent of 27 states or unilateral action, making President Macron’s talk of European sovereignty laughable. The EU is incapable of crafting an extensive, coherent, and effective foreign policy.
Person specifies make their external migration policies. And with the Schengen Contract, the Syrians Germany transplanted may successfully take a trip to other places.
The French are holding up a totally free trade deal with the UK by firmly insisting on considerable access to British fisheries, and a trade deal with the United States to sustain defense for French farmers.
Cyprus just recently held up sanctions against Belarus for a rigged presidential election until it got meaningful sanctions versus Turkey for exploring for gas in contested Eastern Mediterranean waters. A rather farcical way to craft EU foreign policy towards either autocracy.
Macron still vaults the fanciful concept of a European military. Would the Germans ever want to pay or combat? Who would choose when, where, and how to deploy it?
Negotiations within the EU and in-between Europe and its allies outside areas of Brussels’ regulative control– tariffs, state aids, and competition policy– can be surreal. The idea of the United States working out a complementary technique to Chinese mercantilism with Europe would be as sane as whimsically dropping Donald Trump into “Duck Soup” to negotiate a peace and relationship treaty for Fredonia with the Marx Brothers.
The Europeans are fancying a new get-tough policy towards Chinese financial investments in critical technologies, but Germany’s flagging industrial sector has substantial export markets in China.
If Chancellor Angela Merkel is inclined to conserve a buck purchasing gas that will finance Russian rockets, why should we fairly anticipate it to upset China whose dangers are so distant? Alas, Germany is hesitant to sign up with the United States on Huawei even though the options are EU providers Ericsson and Nokia.
Across Europe, China’s state and private business have infiltrated with a vast range of European businesses.
Biden would be much better off if Groucho and Margaret Dumont were still alive. He might appoint them ambassadors general to Europe and a minimum of amusing EU diplomats and heads of state with the etiquette their governance and diplomacy are worthy of.
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