Beyond the cameras, Macron-Biden meeting tougher than it looks

The state visit to Washington this week by President Emmanuel Macron of France highlights both the strengths and the weaknesses of the relationship between the United States and the European Union as a whole. 

These have their roots in the enduring truth of the famous remark by former Belgian Foreign Minister Mark Eyskens that the EU is “an economic giant, a political dwarf, and a military worm.” Worms are by nature both invertebrate and brainless, and the European dwarf suffers not just from height issues but multiple personality disorder. The giant however has a mind and body of its own.

The problem for the Biden administration is that precisely because the EU remains an economic giant, it is chiefly in the area of economics that Biden will be asking Macron to help generate European support; and this is an area where the EU has often shown both the ability and the will to resist U.S. pressure. It is also in the decline of European economies — not military threats to Europe — that the real dangers to European liberal democracy are situated.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to a wave of decisions by European NATO members to boost their military spending; but even if these promises are kept, it will take a considerable time for them to lead to serious improvements in capability. At most, they will allow European countries to supply more arms to Ukraine without draining their own reserves.

Moreover, European militaries are to a considerable extent irrelevant as far as present U.S. strategy is concerned. Russia has neither the ability nor the will to invade NATO, and there appears to be no chance of European governments sending their soldiers to fight in Ukraine. As for European military deployments against China, it is already clear that these will remain purely symbolic.

The EU’s agreement to exceptionally severe economic sanctions against Russia has however been crucial to U.S. strategy, and Biden will seek (and receive) assurances from Macron that France will make sure that these sanctions continue, and will oppose lifting some of them in return for a compromise peace and a resumption of Russian gas supplies to Europe. Macron in turn will ask Biden for understanding of the economic damage the war is causing to Europe (far greater than that to the United States) and the risks that this creates.

Washington feels the need for such assurances because of the increasingly fragile state of European (and especially German) public opinion when it comes to making serious sacrifices for the sake of Ukraine. Macron himself has drawn U.S. criticism for his desire to maintain at least some lines of communication to Moscow, and for his emphasis that negotiations will eventually be necessary to end the war. However, this has not led to any serious breach with the Biden administration, which may indeed itself favor such links, even if it cannot foster them itself.

More serious is the threat to Europe’s stance from below. European publics were much more solidly behind Ukraine in the early months of the war, when it seemed that the existence of Ukraine as an independent state was imperiled; but after a string of Ukrainian successes, and the restriction of Russian forces to limited areas of eastern and southern Ukraine, cracks in European solidarity and willingness to make sacrifices for Ukrainian victory are inevitably beginning to appear, especially in Germany.

Tensions are worsened by increasingly bitter divisions between EU members over the sharing of the resulting energy shortages and economic suffering between different EU members. Resentment of America is also growing at the fact that due to domestic fracking, U.S. gas prices are a fraction of European ones, so that the suffering of the U.S. public as a result of the war is limited. Macron has accused American (and Norwegian) energy producers of exploiting the crisis to earn “superprofits” from exports to Europe. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire has said that U.S. exporters are using the energy crisis “to further U.S. economic domination and weaken Europe.”

The Economist has estimated that the steep increase in electricity prices may lead to 147,000 more deaths in Europe this winter, compared to previous years. European opinion over the next few months will be shaped by whether the winter is harsh or mild, and the impact on energy supplies, mass suffering, and mass unrest are serious or limited in consequence. It is predicted however that barring an end to the war and a resumption of Russian gas supplies, the European energy crisis will extend into 2024 at least; so it is not just this winter that Europe will have to survive.

Given the threats to European solidarity over Ukraine, Macron will ask Biden to reduce — at least somewhat — his administration’s pressure on Europe in another field, that of economic warfare against China. Washington has been successful in getting NATO to align itself declaratively against China, but economic moves — like Europe joining the U.S. ban on the export of equipment for the manufacture of advanced computer chips and semiconductors, which would do further damage to already endangered European industries — are facing much more European resistance.

Additional strain on the U.S.-EU relationship has been placed by the Biden administration’s (misnamed) “Inflation Reduction Act” which provides large tax credits for American (but only American) producers of electric cars and alternative energy. The EU has labeled this unfair discrimination, and is demanding that these de facto subsidies should be extended to European producers as well. Macron will be raising this issue in his talks with Biden. A U.S.-EU task force on the IRA has been created, but there are few signs as yet of it leading to any new agreement.

The idea of “friendshoring” has received some support in America; nonetheless, given the extreme difficulty that the Biden administration had in getting the IRA through Congress at all, it does not seem likely that it will be willing to seek changes to it in order to help Europe. Macron and other European leaders have called for a co-ordinated European strategy of industrial subsidies in response. However, given the tensions between EU members over national subsidies, such a strategy will take considerable time to develop, and in the meantime, this issue will continue to play a disruptive role in U.S.-EU relations.

The United States is now engaged in an effort — which will doubtless be continued under any future Republican administration – to replace the globalization of the past two generations with a new world of economic blocs, in which the Western bloc will be dominated by America and will be directed to holding down or even (in the case of Russia and Iran) seeking to destroy the economies of rival states.

For this strategy to succeed, it is essential that the EU be willing to follow America’s lead. This is a colossal ideological leap for the EU. More importantly, leading European states (Germany in particular) are simply far more dependent both on international energy supplies and reasonably free global trade than is the United States.

In their excessive focus on the perceived military and geopolitical threats from China and Russia, Washington policymakers are in danger of forgetting that the domestic prosperity and political stability of European allies is also a vital U.S. national interest, on which the Transatlantic alliance ultimately rests.

The grandiose ceremonial and language surrounding Macron’s state visit will doubtless flatter Macron, and ameliorate the humiliation inflicted on him last year by America’s role in the destruction of the Franco-Australian submarine deal. Whether an unemployed former European industrial worker freezing in the dark will feel similarly flattered is another matter.

Kyilah Terry contributed to the research for this article.