After four years of former President Donald Trump’s relentless animosity towards Europe, the inauguration of Joe Biden as his successor this week had all the makings of a veritable Hallmark movie of transatlantic harmony. The relief on the other side of the Atlantic is palpable—and nowhere more than in Germany, which had consistently found itself the special object of Trump’s ire. In a recent poll by YouGov and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 73 percent of Germans approved of Biden compared to only 62 percent in France and 50 percent in the United States itself.
In Berlin, Biden’s election was immediately greeted with exuberant speeches by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, and Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer—all offering variants of a transatlantic New Deal. Cohorts of German and American policy experts have hammered out reports with detailed recommendations on how to revive the U.S.-European relationship. (Full disclosure: I participated in two such efforts, to be found here and here.)
