Donald Trump is no Evita Perón. Few in Europe were sad to see him go. And even now, with a moderate force in Joe Biden, most Europeans doubt that America can return to global leadership on international issues such as climate change or the threat of China.
This is the key takeaway of our survey of more than 15,000 Europeans in 11 European countries. It reveals a wide scepticism about the future trajectory of the US, and finds that while many in Europe are sympathetic to the new incumbent in the White House, a majority now thinks the US political system is broken.
The US, in the eyes of many Europeans, will be distracted by internal divisions and struggle to regain global leadership. Six in ten respondents to European Council on Foreign Relation’s survey think China will overtake the US and become the world’s leading superpower in the next ten years. And a majority do not think the US will always protect Europe. Trump’s gamble that it was in Washington’s interest to act as the disrupter-in-chief and to organise the world around asymmetrical bilateral relations with other powers appears to have failed.
Yet, Biden’s hope of a US pivot back to Obama’s policy of embedding American power in a network of alliances also looks unrealistic.
Nearly a third of Europeans believe that having elected Trump in 2016, Americans cannot be trusted. Strikingly, more than half of Germans (53 per cent) hold this view of Europe’s transatlantic partner. While they may be outliers on this point, it’s clear that the damaged international reputation of the US may take longer than a single electoral cycle to heal.
Trump’s impact on transatlantic relationships has made neutrality now the most popular option among Europeans in any potential US conflict with China or Russia. The new US administration may have assumed that Europeans’ shift towards neutrality lay solely with their visceral reaction to Trump. It now seems this may not be the case.
As an alternative to US dependency, Europeans are converging around the idea of a more sovereign and autonomous Europe. Over two-thirds of Europeans believe the region should look after its own security, with particular enthusiasm in France (70 per cent), Sweden (71 per cent), Spain (71 per cent) and even Britain (74 per cent).
This raises the issue of whether Berlin will replace Washington as the “go-to” capital for leadership on foreign policy. Certainly, it seems that many in Europe believe it should—with most respondents in France, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Hungary choosing Germany, above the US, as the “most important country to build a good relationship with.” The freshly-Brexited UK (55 per cent), and Poland (45 per cent), which traditionally see the US as a powerful guarantor of their freedom, were the only countries that ranked the US significantly ahead of Germany.
That said, it would be easy to over-read this data. While European leaders such as Emmanuel Macron tend to interpret popular support for European sovereignty as a wish to play a more important role in global politics, for a substantial majority of citizens it represents a desire for neutrality in the escalating competition between the US and China. For these citizens, sovereignty is not a grand entry by the EU into international politics, but instead an emergency exit door from the bipolar world of tomorrow. It is an application for early retirement from the Great Powers competition.
As Biden begins his term as America’s 46th president, the main takeaway from this data is that Europeans will not automatically take Washington’s side in a new Cold War. It is not that they necessarily disagree with the US agenda. The problem is that they have doubts about its ability to win. And their support will need to be earned with evidence about mutual benefits rather than taken for granted.
After four years of Trump, the existing partnership between the EU and the US is broken and in need of repair. In plague years, as the performance of the American stock market testifies, sentiments, not economic and political realities, run the world. So, the new Biden administration has all reasons to fear not only the poisonous divisions at home, but also the mood of Europeans as America steps back into the world.
