For Pascal Lamy, former European Commissioner and former Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and Laurence Nardon, head of the North America program at the French Institute for International Relations, the future Biden administration will not change its position. line on China, but will try to work with the Europeans.
Should we expect major upheavals in international relations?
Pascal Lamy: We’re going to have a big change in posture, with a friendly Biden. Seen from our side, it’s a relief, because, finally, we will be able to talk to each other on both sides of the Atlantic. All of this will have fairly modest substantive effects for several reasons. The first is that for us Europeans the subject is not Europe, it is China. The American geopolitical and geo-economic point of articulation in the world of today and tomorrow is the Pacific, it is Asia, it is China. It’s not us anymore. It will therefore be his priority, with the same political software as Trump’s. Biden and his electorate see China as a threat to the United States now, which must be more than contained, [comme le théorisait] Henry kissinger [secrétaire d’Etat de 1973 à 1977], but which must be pushed back.
The second reason is that in foreign policy it is the Senate that decides, not just the President. (…) Finally, for us Europeans, we are a much smaller number than in the past. I do not believe at all in a major transatlantic trade agreement. The precedent was also a failure, as it should have been, moreover.
(…) Trump has offered China a geopolitical and geo-economic boulevard. He hit the Chinese on the trade front, with zero or even negative results. (…) What will change is that Europeans and Americans will be able to talk to each other about what they are doing with regard to China. (…) There is already consultation work with the Biden teams.
Laurence Nardon: There is a bipartisan consensus in the United States that is very critical of China today, but there is no real solution. Since Trump, the Americans have understood that their policy of opening up to China, which dates from Kissinger or 2000, with China’s entry into the WTO, was a sort of attempt to counter Ostpolitik, c that is, the idea that we will integrate China into international trade to democratize the country. This dream has totally failed. We will be, since Trump, more aggressive with China on questions of trade, finance…, but there is no real solution to contain or engage China.
We know they are going to be tougher, but what is the Biden administration going to do in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for example? It is extraordinarily risky and complicated. I think they are very worried, because as the government of mainland China continues its assaults on these two territories, the Biden administration, which has brought human rights issues back to the forefront and respect for democracy, will not be able to lower our guard.
Joe Biden wants to propose a “summit of democracies”. Is this the end of multilateralism?
Pascal Lamy: That multilateralism is in crisis, for sure, but that it is its end, I do not believe it. I do not believe that this world should be organized around a multilateralism of tomorrow which would replace that of yesterday and which is only between democracies. From my point of view as a European, one of the challenges of the global multilateral international conversation is to lead countries which are not democratic towards our own democratic values.
What Trump did, that is to say, to switch within the Chinese Politburo the majority of the side more nationalist, more communist, this error which consists in having reinforced in China the autarkic tendency, isolationist, I believe that it ‘is bad. I see China as a threat in some ways. But I find that an autarkic China is much more dangerous than a globalized China. If the summit of democracies is to isolate it, I am not for it.
Laurence Nardon: There is a risk today of seeing the world evolve towards a system that would no longer be the multilateral and international system that we have known since 1945 and, above all, since the fall of the USSR in 1990. The leaders of our world and people in think tanks are working on the hypothesis of a world with spheres of influence. There would be a Western democratic sphere, a sphere under Chinese influence. (…) We could see spheres of underdevelopment continue. It is a very dark prospect. The Paris Peace Forum and others are trying to combat this possibility of a world with differentiated spheres. This will be the adventure of the decades to come.
