As presidential candidate Joe Biden’s team begins cautiously sizing up furniture for the White House, they will have a lot of damaged relationships to repair should U.S. President Donald Trump lose in November. Europe may not top the agenda, but the need to find a new approach to trans-Atlantic relations is an urgent one, especially after Trump’s abrupt withdrawal of troops from Germany. Democrats should not mistake worn rhetoric about “special or inviolable” defense organizations for a forward-looking strategy. To actualize his vision of a “foreign policy for the middle class” if he is elected, Biden must embrace a progressive Europe policy.
Today, an oversecuritized worldview still sees ties with Britain and the European Union primarily as military matters or tools for superpower rivalry. But the factors binding Europe and the United States together are far different from those present in 1949, when NATO was founded. At that point economies were mostly national, capital flows were controlled, and the Cold War looked capable of going hot at any moment, making military cooperation an imminent priority. Today, a new approach to Europe needs to focus on what really ties the two continents together: the power and threat of global money.
