Vthe season of transatlantic quarrels has returned. But everyone has their own style. When Donald Trump castigated French cheeses and big Mercedes in the streets of New York, Joe Biden prefers to look at the sky and talk about the changing climate to achieve the same ends: to restore the “made in the USA”.
This Tuesday, November 8, the twenty-seven members of the European Union are meeting in Brussels to try to find a common response to the new American offensive. Already, the French Minister of Economy asks the European Commission, in an interview in several European media on November 7, to consider a response ” strong “. It must be said that the President of the United States did not go with dead hands.
A year after burying the hatchet between Airbus and Boeing and calming the dispute over the taxation of European steel and aluminum, he got Congress to adopt, in August, a text curiously called a “reduction plan of inflation”. If this indeed includes a section on the reduction of medical and pharmaceutical costs, the essence of this law consists of massive aid of 370 billion dollars (370 billion euros) for renewable energies.
Big exporters
It will have little impact on inflation, but a great deal on American energy and industrial strategy. Especially since this boost is added to the tens of billions already poured out to finance the return of microchip factories to the country. He intends, in fact, to openly promote local industry. Witness this subsidy for electric cars of 7,500 dollars granted only to vehicles produced on American soil and equipped with batteries that are also American.
This overt discrimination infuriates European governments, especially the big automakers like Germany and France. But, basically, Joe Biden shares the same dream as the President of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and her Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton: to rely on the climate transition to relocate industry.
Everyone has their little political worries, however. Joe Biden may have to, after the mid-term elections on November 8, moderate his dreams of ecological virtue, and Europeans are divided on the way forward. The Germans, the biggest industrialists and exporters, and who therefore have the most to lose in the American measures, are less martial than the French, champions of relocation. But transatlantic relations are no longer apart from a paradox.