Biden’s Tour of Europe Leaves a Lot of Unfinished Business

“America is back at the table,” President Joe Biden said at a press conference Sunday in Cornwall following his first G-7 summit. That statement perhaps best encapsulated Biden’s message during his maiden voyage overseas. While he didn’t mention his predecessor by name, the contrast with Donald Trump couldn’t have been clearer. And it certainly came as a relief to the other G-7 leaders, as the summit was mercifully free of temper tantrums and Twitter tirades.

The displays of comity and unity continued in Brussels this week, where Biden participated in a NATO summit Monday and a U.S.-EU summit Tuesday. But of course, hanging over all of these engagements were a set of thorny challenges facing the trans-Atlantic relationship: recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, responding to the rise of China and adapting to the emergence of nontraditional security threats like climate change, to name just a few.

This week on Trend Lines, WPR’s Elliot Waldman talks about the key takeaways from Biden’s tour of Europe with Lauren Speranza, director of trans-Atlantic defense and security at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington.

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Relevant Articles on WPR:

• Leave Infrastructure to China and Compete Where the West Is Stronger

• ‘America Is Back’ Gets a European Road Test

• Biden Should Think Big on the U.S.-EU Trade Agenda

• America’s ‘Return’ Might Not Be Enough to Revive the West

Trend Lines is produced and edited by Peter Dörrie, a freelance journalist and analyst focusing on security and resource politics in Africa. You can follow him on Twitter at @peterdoerrie.

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