With the election to determine his successor less than 20 days away, U.S. President Joe Biden is in Germany for a final meeting with one of Washington’s closest allies.
Biden will meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Friday and also attend a meeting of the European Quad leaders, which includes France and the United Kingdom. Biden and Scholz, who have built a close personal relationship over the past three and a half years, will discuss “the full spectrum of global issues that we’re working on together: strengthening our militaries and shared security, bolstering our economies and bilateral trade, and making our democracies more resilient,” a senior Biden administration official told reporters ahead of the trip. “Germany has been an incredibly close ally and partner over the past few decades and has risen to the moment in the last three-plus years of this administration.”
With the election to determine his successor less than 20 days away, U.S. President Joe Biden is in Germany for a final meeting with one of Washington’s closest allies.
Biden will meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Friday and also attend a meeting of the European Quad leaders, which includes France and the United Kingdom. Biden and Scholz, who have built a close personal relationship over the past three and a half years, will discuss “the full spectrum of global issues that we’re working on together: strengthening our militaries and shared security, bolstering our economies and bilateral trade, and making our democracies more resilient,” a senior Biden administration official told reporters ahead of the trip. “Germany has been an incredibly close ally and partner over the past few decades and has risen to the moment in the last three-plus years of this administration.”
The Berlin visit was originally scheduled to take place last week but was postponed so that Biden could monitor Hurricane Milton as it made landfall in Florida and oversee aid efforts. This will not be his final overseas trip as president, however, as he will also head to Angola in early December after the election. The trip, which was originally planned as a second leg to Biden’s original visit to Germany, will be his first time traveling to Africa as president.
The rapid rescheduling of the Germany trip points to the importance not only of the bilateral relationship but also the United States’ broader relationship with Europe, which Biden has painstakingly rebuilt and strengthened after his predecessor Donald Trump’s more antagonistic relationship with Washington’s foremost allies.
“I think everyone was surprised at the speed with which this trip was rescheduled, probably Olaf Scholz included,” said Rachel Rizzo, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
There will be much to discuss. Top of the agenda will be the war in Ukraine, where Germany is second to the United States in terms of aid provided to the Ukrainian military in its fight against Russia. On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky presented his “victory plan” for the war to Ukraine’s parliament, which he discussed with Biden during a visit to Washington last month. There’s also an element of future-proofing should voters send Trump back to the White House on Nov. 5, with the former president and several of his congressional acolytes expressing far more ambivalence about continuing to keep Kyiv in the fight.
“This trip is about a couple of things—first, it’s about signaling to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin that there still is resolve in the West, specifically political resolve, to continue supporting Ukraine,” Rizzo said. “But also as sort of a farewell tour, I think it’s about hopefully bringing a bit of truth to Berlin, which is that, going forward, Europe is going to have to pick up the slack in terms of support for Ukraine. Because in the United States, its future support does hinge on what happens in the election in a few weeks and also what happens with the U.S. Congress.”
And even as Biden looks to the future, he is bound to have one eye on the past. Repairing the relationship with Europe and NATO amid multiple wars and international crises has been one of the high points of his administration, and a last hurrah in Germany that also includes two other key European allies will give him an opportunity to pad his legacy on that front in the final weeks of his only presidential term.
“There is probably a sense that the president is burnishing his legacy, and for him, the relationship with Europe was about making up for the damages done in the Trump years—on top of that there was this extraordinary historic security crisis that arose with the full scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “It was clear even from before the invasion that this was about the European security order and that Germany was going to be a linchpin of that, and therefore embracing Germany was going to be key to achieving transatlantic and European cohesion.”
It hasn’t been all rainbows and butterflies with Germany and other allies on the continent, however, with many countries and the European Union as a whole sometimes diverging with Washington on issues such as countering China, regulating tech companies, and the approach to dealing with Israel in its ever-expanding war in the Middle East. While some of those issues will undoubtedly be raised one final time this week, Rizzo said they are unlikely to dominate proceedings. “I don’t necessarily think that this is going to be the trip for Biden to hammer Europe on their differences,” she said. “This is going to be more of a victory lap.”
Ultimately, few things are likely to loom larger in Berlin than the upcoming election. “The Germans were really very grateful to have President Biden as a friend for the past four years,” Stelzenmüller said. “And I think we’ll all be holding our breath on Nov. 5.”
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