After four years of Donald Trump’s America First policy combining nationalism and populism, top European officials are ready for renewed American globalist leadership, needing multilateral cooperation, when Joe Biden took over as president of the world’s largest democracy on Wednesday market.
“This new dawn in America is the moment we have been waiting for for so long,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a speech in Brussels, welcoming Biden’s arrival as “overwhelming proof that, once again after four long years, Europe has a friend in the White House. “
“The United States is back and Europe is ready to reconnect with an old and trusted partner to breathe new life into our beloved alliance,” she told European Union lawmakers, hours before Biden took office at his inauguration ceremony. in Washington.
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Elsewhere in Europe, close allies of the U.S. have finally seen a chance to get out of the cold after security problems and economic relations with the Trump administration.
French President Emmanuel Macron noted the urgency to address the dangers the world faces from climate change after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate deal, a move that Biden was expected to reverse in the early hours of his presidency.
With Biden, “we will be stronger to face the challenges of our time. Stronger to build our future. Stronger to protect our planet,” he wrote on Twitter. “Welcome back to the Paris Agreement!”
European leadership, however, warned that the world has changed in the Trump years and that transatlantic ties will be different in the future.
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European Council President Charles Michel, who chairs the summits of the EU’s 27 heads of state and government, said that transatlantic relations “have suffered a lot in the past four years. In these years, the world has become more complex, less stable and less predictable. “
“We have our differences and they will not magically disappear. America seems to have changed, and as it is seen in Europe and the rest of the world it has also changed,” said Michel, whose open criticism of the Trump era was in stark contrast to the silence that reigned mainly in Europe while the Republican leader was in the White House.
This change, said Michel, means “that we Europeans (we must) take our destiny firmly into our own hands, to defend our interests and promote our values”, and underlined that “the EU chooses its course and not waiting for permission to make their own decisions. “
Europeans invited Biden to a summit, most likely in Brussels, in parallel with a high-level NATO meeting as soon as he is ready.
Michel said the EU’s priority is to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and climate change, rebuild the global economy and increase security ties with Washington.