The U.S. Doesn’t Know How to Treat Its Allies – By Kori Schake (Defense One) / Mar 29 2021
If Biden wants to counter China, the U.S. needs to make some sacrifices.
President Joe Biden is promising the world that “America is back,” but his effort to reclaim global leadership shouldn’t come at the expense of the country’s closest friends. At a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken sharply criticized Germany’s efforts to get more natural gas from Russia through a pipeline project known as Nord Stream 2. The president, Blinken warned, “believes the pipeline is a bad idea, bad for Europe, bad for the United States. Ultimately it is in contradiction to the EU’s own security goals.” Not only is the Biden administration continuing former President Donald Trump’s punitive policy against an important ally, but it’s considering further strictures.
Blinken’s statement also reflected a major defect in Obama-era foreign policy: the condescending assumption that other countries don’t understand their own interests. But the U.S. focus on stopping an energy project domestically important for Germany is all the more misguided when the administration’s strategy for managing America’s top security concern—the rise of China—is utterly dependent on a dramatic deepening of allied cooperation. Biden has a choice: Should he prioritize concern about Russia, a nettlesome but less important rival power, or should he consolidate support among America’s allies? And the administration is on the verge of choosing the wrong option.
European reliance on Russian energy resources is significant: EU countries import 30 percent of their crude oil, 40 percent of their natural gas, and 42 percent of their coal from Russia. But the U.S. opposition to Nord Stream 2 nevertheless feels atavistic, because European gas-market integration has defanged much of Russia’s ability to strong-arm other countries by threatening to cut off energy supplies.
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