Jun 18, 2021, 15:52
US President Joe Biden's eight-day trip to Europe has prompted a flood of optimism rhetoric, and many officials chanted that America is finally waving goodbye to those hostile policies and mercurial behaviors during the presidency of Donald Trump.
For Europe, it is reasonable to regard it as a new beginning for the trans-Atlantic relationship. However, after intensive interactions in Britain's coastal county Cornwall and Brussels, European officials probably found that Trump's influence is hard to be wiped out, and their relations are difficult to get back where they were.
The rifts and mistrust between the trans-Atlantic partners concerning a series of issues, from trade to regional and global affairs, still remain hard to fix in a long time.
Trade tensions continue to cast a shadow on their ties. Over four months since Biden took office, Washington has yet to abolish the aluminium and steel tariffs the former government slapped on Europe in the name of "national security," as upholders of the trade barrier are still politically lucrative for Biden.
The longstanding battle between their aircraft manufacturing giants Airbus and Boeing over government subsidies was temporarily concluded with only a five-year truce, and many experts in the industry sighed because the vague terms will lead the two sides to cross swords again.
It is not difficult to understand Europe was somehow disappointed as they had expected Biden would end the trade war swiftly, but it now turns out to be yet another thorny issue.
From the Group of Seven Summit to the EU-US Summit, Biden has tried to mend Washington's relations with its European allies, and persuade them to forge a united front to compete with China and Russia. But some European countries, with concerns over their own interests, are less interested in joining the US-led alliance.
Just as Friedrich Merz, a politician of Germany's Christian Democratic Union party, has warned, Biden's policies would not deviate too much from Trump's. A sober approach for Europe might be to pick up the catchphrase "strategic autonomy" again, especially after Biden's victory.
The recent published Munich Security Report noted Europe must rethink and adjust its strategic and security reliance on the United States, as Washington has shifted its focus eastwards, and it needs to tackle some problems without the safe refuge of its old-time ally.
In other words, siding with the United States might not help, particularly in a time when solving problems need global actors beyond the West.
Sadly, many European politicians and media have been dwelling on the past and are keen on confrontation with China and Russia, following US Cold-War mentality.
In his new book titled The Hypocritical Superpower, Michael Lueders, a well-known German writer, reveals why European voices are prone to promote a trans-Atlantic alliance rather than a pragmatic attitude with China and Russia.
The Western media reports are somehow filtered by interest groups in the United States and used a certain framing that it is between "we western allies the good guys" against China and Russia "the evil ones," Lueders explained.
"Under Joe Biden many things will change, but 'America First' will still continue," Lueders wrote at the end of his book, and that is why Europe should step outside of the shadow of Washington.
In the light of present tensions, the US-China-Europe triangle needs some contextual triangulation.
On its own, the EU has four needs:
one, security of its eastern front,
two, strategic autonomy of its international policies,
three, recovery of its economy and market in tandem with abatement of the contagion; and
four, sin-washing by way of espousing human values.
Europe's Needham was the world's most prolific single encyclopedist. His lifetime work recording China's inventiveness and innovations covered 17 volumes.
That reflects the main point about China in the stream of global human history - she was already great for a long time before and her rapid re-emergence in the last four decades after waves of devastation visited on her is testimony of her resilient human spirit to resuscitate her past greatness. It should also not be lost on Europe that she was pillaged and ruined by europeans once before on her own home ground.
Furthermore, because of the speed at which she has reeemerged, western politics only visages a threat on the excuse that her government runs the country and foreign relations in a way different from theirs.
Meanwhile, western economics continues to enjoy the win-win relationship where mutual cooperation and respect help both to overcome political hurdles and grow synergistically.
What western politics is trying to do is to sabotage that respect in order to decouple from China economically with view to isolating her so as to pressurize her politics to conform to their standards.
However those standards were not made in consultation with her or in recognition that her situation is in many regards totally off-their-norm.
Her apparent success todate seems to say the west has been making bad bets with regards both the veracity and wokish inapplicability of its own standards and methods for its own social, economic and industrial progress. And for that observation, the west is therefore not qualified to try and pin its norms on her when she is already a success in her own right.
That said, she is making reforms at her own pace and to her own timetable so as to remain engaged with the west in a world which remains conflicted whenever there is any loss of multilateralism and multipolarity.
Her Foreign Investment Law addresses all the major past concerns but unlike the US turning aggressive against her with its total gain-of-function Innovation & Competition Act as well as its B3W-Nato proposals to supplant her BRI, she has been developing her policies scientifically which means test, learn, improvise, improve and co-harmonize in timely and synchronized fashion.
Goverments in the west on the other hand don't do that; they theorize on the fly without experimentation on the ground which would explain the rise of divisive trumpian and yellow vest populisms. Maybe it's because they are smaller and forget how big and diverse she is so that their actions on her she would naturally view with dismay, given her past at their hands and her present barraged by their lies and omission of their own accountabilities.
For instance, human values? Try Guantanamo. Concentration camp? Introduced by England. Forced labor and racism? How about indentured Chinese hands in the Californian railways, French trenches and Liverpool ship bowels for starters. Present exploitation, Wuhan? Proofs? Poofftt...
Merkel realizes all this. Her CDU's Laschet would also realize it's not just about the China market for German autos which will define Germany's trajectory for the rest of this century.
In the possible absence of any CAI, it will be Germany's bilateral arrangement with China for a total and global maker-market expansion as thrust for both inasmuch a joint realtime living example of success for the rest of the EU, all the more relevant as Macron has just lost a regional election as preamble to France's next year presidential pick.
That would be the antidote to the US' strategy to recruit Europe to decouple from China, thereby causing Europe to lose a market and supply chain it has been enjoying all along to be swapped over to a US which is today enjoying China's purchases of those US agroproducts what was once enjoyed but now disdained by its other poodle, Australia.
Which comes to one other observation. England was an imperial power by dint of its blue-water navy which was subsequently displaced by the US. Both use naval warships to project and exert maritime power over other nations which trade to survive; those naval extensions thus influence and divide the geoeconomic inclinations of those other nations in the tradition of divide and conquer.
Today and ex-UK, Europe has no maritime powers of note at a time when the locus of trade will be reconcentrating to the new center that is the Eurasian continental landmass, helped along by China's BRI with over 170 countries participating, less so by the US' B3W seeking for funding from a G7 private sector about to be clobbered by climate change costs.
In the light of this, does Europe still want to pally-party only with a US with 74 million voters seething for temporarily losing their Maga rally call when a hand-in-glove cooperation with a China which has never once been a threat to Europe in any way will assure Europe pari passu economic recovery on a trajectory of positive reform and global technology-enabled transformation for all, human values inclusive? And by the way, today Russia and China are the best of friends.
Re: "why Europe should step outside of the shadow of Washington."
They'll not until the core Unit, now without the Brits manages to get their mind together ande decide an United EU is fully capable to deal with anything politically, without NATO.
The new EU NATO under one Command, guided by EU political wisdom will generate prosperity across the land while uncle Sam's domination may stay within the Quad and remaining 4 eyes...
Re: "That's why they've resorted to gangsterism"
Incredibly fitting descreription I must say; 'gangsterism'.
They even lowered themselves to make freedom of slaves a national holiday, while the supreme court ruled 'compensation is NOT required as you been paid with your freedom.'.
When the English are worse at English than the Chinese, you know you’re in trouble.
- SATs aren't damaging kids — low expectations are
And the illegitimate state of New Izrael, as usual, performed even worse, appearing at the bottom of the PISA tests.
This is what underlies all of the anglo/jew policy. White-supremacism is all about holding back others. That's why they had the Chinese Exclusion Act and torched Tulsa, the "Black Wall St.". Under half-black war criminal, Obama, they blocked ethnic Chinese from interacting with NASA or the so-called International Space Station. You're supposed to believe that the odds favour only a half-black becoming POTUS and as such it wasn't straightforward bigotry to block China.
With the China's space station now in operation, the Anglo and the Jew are merely excluding themselves from the progress of humanity. Already, China and Russia are pointing out that the Great Satan cannot operate from a position of strength. That's why they've resorted to gangsterism; ganging-up on China.
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