Welcome to this week’s Active Measures: a double issue to mark the NATO, US-EU, G7 and US-Russia summits.
Joe Biden's greatest asset is that he is not Donald Trump. That fact alone all but guaranteed a friendly and productive G-7 Summit in Cornwall.
But the big questions remain
Can the United States stitch together an effective coalition of the democracies to cope with China?
Do those allies believe that Trump was an aberration and that we are now back to business as usual?
Answers require deeds not words. It will be the months after the summitry not the minutes during it that decide whether the West is back.
One problem is US protectionism. Real clout in economic governance means building strong transatlantic and transpacific structures (like the TTIP and TPP that were so carelessly abandoned in the Obama and Trump eras). But such proposals smell like free trade — toxic to the blue-collar workers who gave the Democratic Party its narrow victory. Not terribly popular in Europe, either.
Another is that Western adversaries still feel they can operate with impunity. We await serious pushback on:
Cybercrime (mainly hosted in Russia).
Military sabre rattling and bullying by the Chinese navy.
Lawlessness and repression in Russia and Belarus. And — upcoming
Energy blackmail against Ukraine (heralded by Putin at the St Petersburg Economic Summit last week).
Biden wants to park the Russia issue. The problem is that Russia does not want to be parked. It wants to drive down the middle of the road: flashing its lights, music blaring, turning heads and blocking traffic.
The danger is that the US focus on China is perceived to come at the expense of its commitment to European security. That creates room for manoeuvre for the Kremlin – and also leverage. What can you get away with? How much will America pay to prevent a crisis bubbling over?
A foretaste of this is the US waiver of sanctions on Nordstream 2, the Russian-German natural gas pipeline. The perceptions is that to placate Germany, the United States threw its east European allies (Poland, Ukraine) under a bus. Readers may recall something similar 12 years ago, when the Obama administration hurriedly announced changes in its missile defence plans for Poland and the Czech Republic. As with North Stream, the decision itself was defensible; the way it was announced is not.
Biden hurried to repair the damage with a phone call to Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy. (though not to President Duda of Poland, a country that is still in the deep freeze because of its Trumpish past).
But the damage is done. Those who maintained that Nordstream 2 was just a business project, not a political one have already had their answer.
Can Europe get its act together, on military spending and standing up to China?
On the first question the signs in northern Europe are encouraging. A preliminary conclusion of my big report on Baltic Sea security is that Sweden, Finland and Norway together with Denmark are creating a kind of North European mini-NATO. There is still work to be done but the outline of new arrangements for Baltic Sea security with a mixture of British and American involvement is already taking shape.
On China to the European Union is shifting, although not as fast as United States would like.
Huawei’s involvement in 5G networks is diminishing fast — unimaginable only five years ago.
The European Parliament has emerged as the mainstay of hawkish sentiment in the European institutions.
The CAI investment deal looks dead in the water.
There's also increased European willingness to deal with Taiwan. That makes it harder for the mainland to maintain that this is a bilateral issue so that this is a an internal issue where only the United States is meddling.
Even if the West has stopped its retreat, it is not yet advancing. Most of the world is now sceptical about the G-7 in terms of both competence and integrity.
botched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan;
the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath; and now
the belated, half-hearted response to the pandemic.
have all undermined the prestige and clout of the advanced industrialised democracies. It will be a long way back.
I've just seen this striking ECFR survey of how Europeans see Britain. The score in Germany is stunningly bad.
What I've been doing.
This Sky News podcast with Adam Boulton, Sophia Gaston and Deborah Haynes. Russia and China think the West is in long-term decline. We have yet to convince them otherwise.
Giving an interview to Polish radio: the Putin-Biden summit is a mistake.
And to Polish TV. The interviewer was not expecting me to lambast Poland’s erratic foreign policy, and particularly its approach to China. I am not sure if the clips were broadcast.
Organising an open letter of academics (Snyder, Etkind, Žižek) calling for the creation of a new East European University to host Russian and Belarusian scholars in exile.
My Times column argued that Biden was repeating Obama’s errors.
I reviewed this gripping literary guide to CS Lewis’s fictional Narnia.
My CEPA column this week highlighted the threat China poses to academic freedom. Last week’s said it was a mistake to mock Lukashenka. He and his kind are winning.
Plus: the weekly China Influence Monitor (most recent here, the previous one here). Fighting pomposity with ridicule, and murk with day-light.
What I’ve been reading: Max Egremont’s forthcoming book on the Baltics.
I will be back in your inboxes next week.
Best regards
Edward
PS I'm sorry for missing an edition of Active Measures last week. I will publish a bonus issue in the weeks to come so subscribers won't miss out.