Biden's European Tour Signals U.S. Pivot to Counter China's Rise

Joe Biden's first international journey as president was meant to announce something unmistakable to the world: America was back, and it was coming back as the leader of the democratic West, not as a lone actor cutting bilateral deals in the shadows. The trip would take him to London for the G-7 summit, then to Brussels for NATO talks, and finally to Geneva on June 16th for a face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin. But the real subject threading through all three stops was China—its military buildup, its technological ambitions, its treatment of minorities, its grip on Hong Kong, its threats toward Taiwan. After four years of what Biden's team called the Trump hurricane, the new administration was signaling a fundamental reorientation of American power.

The contrast was deliberate. Trump had questioned NATO's purpose, cozied up to Putin while his own administration sanctioned Russia, and pursued a transactional approach to alliances that left European partners unsettled. Biden was offering something different: a recommitment to collective defense, a reaffirmation of Article 5 (the mutual defense clause that had been invoked only once, after September 11th), and a vision of democracies writing the rules of the twenty-first century rather than watching authoritarian powers do it for them. In an op-ed published in The Washington Post on the eve of his departure, Biden framed the tour as an opportunity to "demonstrate the capacity of democracies to meet the challenges and neutralize the threats of our era." He listed the pandemic, climate crisis, and "the harmful activities of the governments of China and Russia." The message was clear: America would lead from strength, not retreat into isolation.

China occupied the center of this new strategy. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO's secretary general, had met with Biden at the White House just before the trip, and the conversation had been dominated by Beijing's rise. Stoltenberg acknowledged the opportunities—trade, climate cooperation, arms control talks—but the worry was unmistakable. China would soon have the world's largest economy. It already had the second-largest military budget and was pouring resources into advanced weapons systems. It was crushing democratic protests in Hong Kong, persecuting Uyghur minorities, and threatening Taiwan. Yet even as these concerns mounted, the language mattered. Stoltenberg insisted China was not an "adversary," a word choice that reflected European discomfort with Cold War rhetoric. But in Washington, the vocabulary had already shifted. Kurt Campbell, Biden's top Asia diplomat, had declared at Stanford in late May that the era of "engagement" with China was finished. The new framework was "competition" between great powers.

In Brussels, Biden would meet with Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Charles Michel, president of the European Council. The focus would be on ensuring that democracies—not China, not anyone else—shaped the rules governing trade and technology in the coming decades. Specifically, they would explore collaboration on 5G networks and work to secure semiconductor supplies, those tiny processors that power most digital devices and had become scarce. It was a way of saying: we will not let Beijing control the technological future.

The trip also included a meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to discuss Syria and Afghanistan, but the final act was the Putin summit. The timing was tense. The United States had endured cyberattacks it blamed on the Kremlin, Russian interference in elections, and ongoing hostilities in Ukraine. Biden's team spoke of wanting to "restore predictability and stability" to the relationship. But there was an important difference from the Trump years: this time, the president and his government were aligned. Trump had extended a confusing warmth to Putin even as his administration imposed sanctions for election interference—a contradiction that had raised eyebrows, especially since those interference operations had benefited Trump himself. Biden offered no such contradiction. His administration would speak with one voice.

What Biden was attempting, in essence, was a recalibration of American power after years of drift. Not a return to the Obama era—the world had changed, China had grown stronger, and the calculus had shifted. Instead, a new framework: democracies united, China as the central strategic concern, Europe as a crucial partner rather than a burden, and multilateral leadership as the antidote to both Trump's transactionalism and Beijing's authoritarian model. Whether Europe would fully embrace this vision, whether the focus on China would alienate Russia further, whether the semiconductor and 5G initiatives would actually constrain Beijing's technological reach—these were questions the coming weeks would begin to answer.