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Diplomacy and International Institutions

Biden Seeks to Revive U.S.-Europe Relations

Is America back and able to make the West once again the core of an open, rules-based world order? Biden and his counterparts have an opportunity to prove skeptics wrong this week.

Originally published at World Politics Review

Then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden makes a joint statement with European Council President Donald Tusk ahead of a meeting at EU Council headquarters in Brussels on February 6, 2015. REUTERS/Yves Herman

By experts and staff

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  • Stewart M. Patrick
    James H. Binger Senior Fellow in Global Governance and Director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program

In my weekly column for World Politics Review, I preview the main issues at play at the upcoming G7, NATO, and European Union summits.

The United States is “back,” proclaims U.S. President Joe Biden, seemingly as often as he can. The coming week will show if the same is true of the West. At successive summits of the G-7, NATO and the European Union, Biden and fellow leaders will confront a dual task: reviving the community of advanced market democracies and showing that the West is capable of resolving today’s complex transnational challenges.

Biden’s election in November heartened the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and understandably so. The new president promised to pick up the mantle of global leadership that Trump had cast aside and make the West once again the core of an open, rules-based world order. The aberrant Trump years might then recede into the past, eventually viewed as a bizarre interregnum between two “normal” periods of U.S. internationalism.

Read the full World Politics Review article here.