Europe and the US: Hard To Break Up, Yet Drifting Apart

The outcome of French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to the United States should have come as a surprise to no one. Nothing was achieved with regard to energy prices or the Inflation Reduction Act, the European Union’s biggest demands. As the German media observed, President Joe Biden refused to make even the slightest concession, and this accurately reflects the current relationship between Europe and the United States.

With its intertwined interests, the relationship between Europe and the United States will hold up for the foreseeable future, but the two sides are drifting apart. The root causes of this drift are the irreconcilable differences in the highest strategic interests of the two countries.

US Actively Obstructing European Integration

The highest national interest of the United States is to defend its global hegemony and that of the dollar, while the EU wants to accelerate European integration and become a unified and powerful world pole. The EU is currently the third largest economy in the world and, other than China, is arguably in the strongest position to supersede the United States. Of the three major currencies that the Federal Reserve believes represent a challenge to the dollar, it is the euro that comes in at first place. Therefore, should the EU achieve its goals, it would be a direct threat to U.S. hegemony — and what makes this even more problematic for the United States is that Europe is an ally with shared values. The consequences of this are twofold.

The first is that Europe dares to say no to the United States, and not in words alone. Barack Obama, for example, was opposed to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, but several European countries became members regardless. The United States has for many years been opposed to the Nord Stream gas pipelines; Europe, on the other hand, has insisted on them throughout. In addition, the China-EU Comprehensive Agreement on Investment was reached despite open opposition from the United States. And when Donald Trump launched his trade war against the world, only Europe and China dared to put up a fight and resist it to the end.

It may be understandable in matters of direct and vital interest to Europe, but when pushing for action not directly related to Europe, there are times when the United States still actively obstructs matters. A typical example was the 2003 war in Iraq, to which France and Germany together with China and Russia were opposed, forcing the United States to bypass the U.N. vote and send in troops without justification, at great moral cost.

As we can see, the United States has been obstructing European integration both explicitly and implicitly. Political amateurs show scant regard for political correctness — much like Trump, who publicly lent his full-throated support to Britain’s exit from the EU both before and after his time in office, even pushing the image of the EU as a ball and chain around Britain’s ankles. Trump, never a fan of free trade, even went so far as to promise Britain a trade deal.

The second consequence is that it makes it impossible to take direct action at any time, such as with attempts to contain China; instead, highly complex and difficult diplomatic maneuvers become necessary. An example of this is the use of NATO’s eastward expansion and meddling in the Ukraine situation to engineer a crisis, and then taking advantage of the crisis to weaken Europe. Wittingly or unwittingly, this forces all parties involved into “matches or mismatches,” requiring a certain amount of serendipity in order for anything to be achieved.

In addition, there are fundamental differences between the United States and Europe on how to face the rise of China. While the United States sees China as its No. 1 threat and does its best to contain it, Europe positions China as a partner and a competitor. There are three main reasons for this:

First, China and Europe are at a great remove geographically; Europe is not now pursuing hegemony; and there is no geopolitical tension between the two.

Second, if Europe wishes to be strategically autonomous and to strengthen its own development, it needs the world at this stage to be a multipolar one, allowing it to play both sides of the fence. Particularly in the game between the United States and China, Europe is the direct beneficiary, which is also the reason why it holds an important position between China and the United States.

Third, both China and Europe have huge economic interests. Europe has long been China’s No. 1 trading partner, or close to it, with China having overtaken the United States as Europe’s top trading partner in 2020 and bilateral trade exceeding $800 billion in 2021. In addition to markets, Europe has developed a dependence on China in many other areas. At present, The EU depends on China for half of its 137 products, including health and medical supplies and goods related to the renewable energy sector. Of the 30 metals defined as “vital” by the EU, 19 rely mainly on Chinese exports, making the EU’s energy transition inseparable from China’s.

Germany, the largest economy in the EU, relies directly on China for more than a million jobs and indirectly for many more. Almost half of European investment in China comes from Germany, and 70% of the rare-earth elements and other metals needed for its industry come from China. Forty-six percent of German companies depend on Chinese suppliers, and if that supply were to cease, half of them would have no choice but to halt production.

While the United States may see fit to sacrifice economic interests for the sake of hegemony, there is no reason for Europe to do so. What is front and center is that the Chinese and European economies are of important strategic value. The reason why Europe, reliant as it is on the United States for security, dares to say no is that it draws confidence from Russia’s energy and China’s economy. A Europe that has lost Russia only to lose China as well would be reduced to little more than a vassal of the United States.

Europe Playing the ‘China Card’ as a Show of Force to the US

That is why German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was intent on visiting China before the Group of 20 summit in Bali, why Macron expressed the desire to visit China shortly after his visit to the United States, and why European Council President Charles Michel also visited China earlier. Of course, the outside world could interpret this as Europe playing both sides of the China-U.S. card, but more than anything else, it is a signal to the United States that if it does not respond to Europe’s concerns, Europe will turn to China.

In addition to the differences between Europe and the United States over their top strategic interests, the rise of populism in the United States has also seriously affected bilateral relations. Even though populism is sweeping the world, Europe’s two foremost countries, France and Germany, have risen to its challenges; and while the EU is firmly in the hands of the establishment, in the United States, Trump has triumphed. During his term in office, he opposed globalization and free trade and withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris climate agreement, the Iran nuclear deal and even from the United Nations Human Rights Council. The EU was against all of these.

In today’s United States, however, populism has become mainstream. It is not just that the Republican Party has become Trumpified; the Democratic Party too has had no choice but to cater to a myriad of issues, under pressure from public opinion. Thus far, Biden has refrained from negotiating any trade agreements, and international, multilateral, economic cooperation organizations like the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which he pushed for but which excluded tariffs, have introduced more subsidies than Trump during his presidency. This is why Canadian economist Pierre Lemieux argues that “Biden’s protectionism [is] Trump with a more human face”; the French media too have commented that Biden is similarly pursuing an America First policy, but that he’s just going about it more subtly. Now that Trump has announced his candidacy, the Trumpification of the United States will continue with a vengeance, irrespective of whether he wins the election. The bigger test of European-U.S. relations is yet to come.

All things considered, it is the divergence of structural, strategic interests between Europe and the United States that is the determining factor in the two sides inevitably drifting away from each other.

The author is a visiting scholar and political scientist based in Paris, and a researcher at Fudan University’s China Institute, Shanghai.