You will see Joe Biden again and again these days with Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Ursula von der Leyen, the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, later also with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. The carefully prepared communiqués, press statements and "family photos" of the powerful are intended to suggest that after years of disruption, the diplomatic routine reigns supreme. But nothing about the meetings under the familiar banners of the G7, NATO and the European Union is like it used to be.
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Once upon a time, the rich democracies and their organizations stood for power in the world. They thought history was on their side. Today they are concerned with a signal of resistance against the zeitgeist: Nowhere is it written that the crisis of Western democracy must keep getting worse. It is not a historical calamity, but an open-ended battle. Neither the rise of the populists nor the victory of the authoritarian regimes in a system comparison are inevitable. Joe Biden has embodied this hope since defeating Trump.
Yet there are unspoken questions that America's partners will seek answers to in the days ahead. How serious is Biden about the new beginning? How strong is its backing, how deep is the crisis of American democracy? How does his foreign policy differ from that of his predecessor, beyond the kind words? In other words: how much Trump is in Joe Biden?
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Next weekend, the President will meet the G7 partners, the old core team of the political and economic West, which includes the United States and Canada, the British, French, Germans, Italians and Japanese, first in Cornwall , in the south-west of England. The host Boris Johnson can chalk up it as a success that the heads of government of the rich democracies have already agreed in advance on a minimum tax for international corporations. You will also be vowed to do more to combat climate change and to fight global corona.
On Monday, the president in Brussels will reassure the NATO partners that the guarantee of assistance in Article 5, according to which every member of the alliance can rely on the help of the alliance partners in the event of an attack, still applies - a guarantee that Donald Trump had questioned.
A US-EU summit will follow on Tuesday, which will deal with the common "global challenges". In order not to misunderstand what is meant by this phrase, the President previously stated in the Washington Post that it was important to "ensure that market-based democracies, not China or anyone else, comply with the rules of the 21st century (...) write".
If everyone involved plays along, the message at the end of the three summits will be: The obituaries for the West were premature. In the future, we will again enforce our interests together.
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So much for the plan. Then there is the highlight of the US President's comeback tour, the meeting with Vladimir Putin next Wednesday in Geneva . To get in the mood, the Russian President told the Tass news agency that today's USA reminded him very much of the late Soviet Union: an overestimating empire that could still force the loyalty of its allies through pressure, intimidation and corruption, but at the same time would deteriorate from within.
The Soviet comparison is a typical Putin insolence. The Russian president knows his way around fragile empires. He rules one himself.
The Beijing Global Times, a mouthpiece of the Chinese regime, took up Putin's polemics in several articles: Biden, like Donald Trump before him, wanted to divert attention from the domestic problems of the US by blowing a fight against rivals such as Russia and China. American democracy has been so weakened by polarization that it lacks the strength and internal cohesion to continue to enforce its global hegemony.
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That is quite polemical, but unfortunately it cannot be dismissed entirely out of hand. It also hits a nerve with America's insecure partners. Nobody wants to say it because it tarnishes the image of the regained unity of the liberal democracies, but the foreign policy of the Biden government is sometimes difficult to understand, even for its closest allies. Take security policy, for example: the US president likes to assert "America's renewed commitment to our allies and partners". But he decided to withdraw suddenly from Afghanistan without consulting the Europeans, who now have to hastily withdraw their troops.
Joe Biden also opted for the release of patent protection for corona vaccines without coordination. The federal government believes this is the wrong way to overcome the shortage of vaccines. Berlin even suspects Biden of wanting to stage himself as a global benefactor at the expense of the Europeans, whom he puts in the corner of the heartless capitalists, in order to compete with China in vaccination diplomacy.
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Example trade policy: Joe Biden propagates a "foreign policy for the common people". This is a much friendlier phrase than "America first",but behind it lies a similarly restrictive understanding of free trade and globalization. Joe Biden had promised in the election campaign to rejoin the free trade pact with the Asian countries (TPP), from which Trump had withdrawn the US. But now he is submitting to the protectionist doctrine that such agreements only served to take advantage of America. Trump's attacks on globalization continue to have an effect: In order to protect domestic jobs from competition, according to the consensus, it is important to promote exports and make imports more difficult - a problem for export-dependent partners like Germany. Incidentally , the tariffs imposed by Trump on steel and aluminum from Europe under the pretext of "national security" are still in force. (Negotiations have been taking place since mid-May.)
Take Russia, for example : Joe Biden recently said that Putin was a "killer" - and yet he is now meeting him for a dialogue. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, it was said from Washington for a long time, would weaken Ukraine and make Germany dependent on Russian gas. But now the Biden government is signaling to Berlin: We're not going to sanction your companies, so in God's name finish this thing if you care that much. A few days ago, Putin threatened Ukraine that the country would have to show itself "goodwill" to Russia in order to continue to earn money from the transit of Russian gas. Apparently he feels he is on the longer lever. The Geneva summit is less risky for him than for the US president. For Putin, the only thing that matters is to be perceived again as a superpower boss on an equal footing. Biden will be measured by how decisively he opposes Putin's authoritarian-aggressive course at home and in Russia's neighborhood (and thus also his predecessor, who fraternized with Putin almost exactly three years ago).
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Nowhere are the differences between Biden and Trump as clear as in Middle East politics. A team of American diplomats is conducting indirect negotiations with Iran in Vienna to save the nuclear deal from which Trump led the United States. If the mediating Europeans manage to revive the agreement together with Biden's people, that would also be a victory for a diplomatic method that Trump hated: multilateralism, international cooperation on problems that cannot be solved nationally or bilaterally. Elections will take place in Iran in a week, and a hardliner's victory seems inevitable. (All moderate candidates have been excluded beforehand.) This is another reason why Israeli observers see the determination of the Biden people.
A change of direction is also on the horizon with regard to Israel. Joe Biden is coming under increasing pressure from the left wing of his party. Some left-wing democrats see the struggle of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation as that of an oppressed minority, analogous to Black Lives Matter. A deceptive analogy, but it has the potential to revolutionize American Israel policy: If the Palestinians cannot realize their rights in their own state, the pressure to enforce them under Israeli rule will increase.
Americans and Europeans are moving closer to their positions in the Middle East. But what is decisive today is Far East policy, and conflicts lurk there. No topic is more important to Biden than the competition with China. Here he is completely in line with Donald Trump, who was the first to openly break with the idea that China could be transformed by being integrated into the international system. Biden also relies on confrontation, only he wants America's partner by his side. The fixation on the new system conflict is the actual organizational principle of US foreign policy today, non-partisan. Perhaps that explains the driving force behind other topics: They have to be cleared away quickly in order to be able to concentrate on the main thing.
Whether it is wise to view international politics solely through the prism of this one rivalry is more controversial between Americans and Europeans than the consensus-trimmed summits will suggest. There is a fundamental dispute behind this: The Biden government is looking at all alliances from the point of view of whether they are useful against the authoritarian challenger in Beijing. Many Europeans, led by the Merkel government, find it counterproductive to form the large democracies in opposition to China. This would not help Taiwan, Hong Kong or the Uyghurs.
Joe Biden won't let that get rid of him. This controversy is certainly also about interests: Europe, especially Germany, is more dependent on China than the United States (which is increasingly recognized as a problem). But the dispute cannot be reduced to that: Joe Biden is forcing a debate on the West about its geopolitical orientation. As with Ostpolitik during the Cold War, it revolves around the right balance between hardness and openness.
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