Since coming to power in Washington, the Biden Administration has been trying to utilize every opportunity to control the damages caused by the Trump Administration to the relations between the United States and the European Union.  The difficulty of these trans-Atlantic relations comes from the fact that the U.S. and E.U. have growing differences in their approaches toward major global power relations. Growing doubt across the continent toward the reliability of the U.S. as an all-weather strategic partner, caused by the Trump administration, is a major damage that needs to be reconstructed. This has been amplified by growing “fake news and targeted propaganda” from outside the E.U. that are hostile to Western democracies and assess a strong trans-Atlantic partnership as a security threat. Indeed, U.S. and E.U. relations have been more political and historically suffer from a lack of institutional partnership in reconstructing alliance relations that demands long-term investment. However, there are short-to- immediate-term areas of global cooperation in which the E.U. should play a more effective leading role toward greater international cooperation in support of local peace and regional stability, especially with regard to the refugee crisis. Just as the U.S. is the optimal destination of refugees from Latin America, the E.U. is the desired destination across Asia and Africa. There is no doubt that establishing effective migration policies on the basis of U.S. and E.U. humanitarian laws are instrumental. Since local conflicts are a key factor in causing massive numbers of refugees, addressing the migration crisis from a mere security and law enforcement angle is superficial and costly, and never adequate to address the crisis of refugees. A threat-based approach to the immigration crisis in the E.U. might help in crafting tougher immigration policies and the construction of security borders across the eastern borders, but it will never stop the wave of refugees toward central Europe. “An E.U. Global Moment: Finding a Path to Peace in Afghanistan and Syria,” offers up-to-date analysis of the interlink between local conflict and regional and international security.  Read More

The article was published by the Berlin Policy Journal, which is a European foreign affairs magazine, edited in Germany’s capital and published by the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP).