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Staff cheer Donald Trump's helicopter as it leaves the White House, October 22, 2020
Photo: Tia Dufour / White House / ZUMA Wire / imago images
America has voted, the world breathes easy.
Joe Biden won the election - albeit narrowly.
And it took a long time for all the votes to be counted.
Despite everything, this election is a powerful example of the power of democracy.
More Americans have cast their votes than ever before, and the turnout has been higher than it has been in 100 years.
And Joe Biden has a majority on the crucial electoral body.
So, congratulations on your election, Mr. President.
And so as not to cover up the obvious with diplomatic phrases: Like many of my counterparts across Europe, I am relieved.
Not because a Democratic president is necessarily always closer to us than a Republican.
We Germans in particular remember what Republican presidents did for the security and unity of our country.
But the incumbent US president - not least because of his "handling" of political and scientific facts - disregarded principles of democratic coexistence and damaged the pillars of the international order.
The United States is and will remain Europe's closest partner and ally in the world.
Despite all the irritations that the current US president has repeatedly caused, comparisons with rulers of pseudo-democratic states, as we are all too happy to make, are forbidden.
Any demand for equidistance goes wrong: the United States is and will remain Europe's closest partner and ally in the world - not only because of common interests, but because we stand on the side of democracy and the rule of law and respect human dignity.
That is the foundation of our relationships that has never been in question - not even in the past four years.
The election of Joe Biden now enables a new chapter in collaboration, a collaboration that is urgently needed in a world of growing uncertainty.
Here Europe is the framework for action for our country.
This is not just a lesson from our history that urges us to "never be alone again" in our foreign policy.
It is also the insight that essential geopolitical developments can no longer be turned back: the bipolar world of the post-war period is history once and for all.
And contrary to what many believe, it does not come in the guise of a new bipolar antithesis, USA vs.
China back.
The rising powers of Asia, South America, and soon also Africa will not be satisfied with a seat in the stands, not to mention the geostrategic player Russia.
Whether we are moving in the direction of a multilateral order or a non-polar disorder: In this world of almost 10 billion inhabitants, we Europeans only have the choice of becoming the plaything of powers alone or playing together as players on an equal footing.
We will take Joe Biden at his word that one of his first acts is to sign re-entry into the Paris Climate Agreement.
That is why we will continue to move forward on the path to European independence after the US elections.
This year, with a coordinated economic policy strategy, we have made progress that very few would have believed us to be able to do until recently and that has gained recognition all over the world.
The nucleus of a fiscal union is now here;
it was necessary in the short term to organize European solidarity in response to the corona pandemic; in the long term, it will be the starting point for European fiscal sovereignty.
Similar steps are long overdue, particularly in the area of foreign and defense policy.
On the basis of this common fundamental conviction, we should now set about deepening our ongoing cooperation in these fields with the USA as our closest ally.
At the top of this agenda is tackling the greatest challenge facing humanity in our time: combating climate change.
We will take Joe Biden at his word that one of his first acts is to sign re-entry into the Paris Climate Agreement.
This opens up the possibility of starting negotiations on the establishment of a transatlantic emissions trading system which, in the long term, will have to cover all of the world's major economies.
The need to transform our economies towards climate neutrality is indispensable.
The expected turnaround in climate policy in the USA offers a great opportunity for German, European and American companies.
The naive view of free trade, whose welfare-increasing effects are miraculously automatically distributed evenly, has been refuted all over the world.
In recent years the EU has started to fundamentally reorganize its trade policy.
The realignment is not yet complete, but the understanding is gaining ground that trade contracts are never purely commercial.
Citizens rightly ask us to take human rights into account and to include compliance with labor and environmental standards in our trade relations.
The naive view of free trade, whose welfare-increasing effects are miraculously automatically distributed evenly, has been refuted all over the world.
We have to make trade fair through standards and frameworks, or we rightly fail because of the anger of those who feel let down - be it in Detroit, Duisburg or Dakar.
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Anyone who tramples on the dignity of work for a few calculated welfare gains will sooner or later delegitimize the international cooperation that we so urgently need and lay the seeds for the kind of nationalistic setbacks that we have with the recent US administration, among others experienced.
That is why we want to make a new form of trade contract the gold standard in world trade.
For this we need the USA as a partner by our side.
The prerequisite for this is also that we immediately set about resolving the remaining issues between our two economic areas, restore the full capacity of the WTO to act and press ahead with its reform.
The same applies to the reorganization of the taxation of global companies.
Citizens rightly expect that the large digital corporations in particular will finally participate appropriately in the financing of the community.
Within the framework of the OECD, we are well advanced towards a global corporate tax reform, which also includes the establishment of global minimum tax rates.
We will invite the new US administration to fully support these initiatives in order to reach a global agreement by next summer.
We Europeans will have to take more responsibility for our security.
At the same time, we must come back to a common and comprehensive understanding of our security situation at the highest level.
Here, too, we Europeans must not be under any illusions: Joe Biden will continue the focus on the Asia-Pacific region that began under President Obama.
We Europeans will have to take more responsibility for our security.
The framework for security policy transatlantic cooperation is provided by NATO, the meeting of which must once again become a forum for strategic exchange instead of a place for publicly waged mock battles over the level of military spending.
Reinforced security cooperation must go hand in hand with a renaissance in arms control and disarmament policy.
We Europeans are directly threatened by the violation and termination of the INF Treaty and must therefore resolutely take our position together.
An immediate extension of the New START treaty for the disarmament of strategic nuclear weapons is also required.
For this we finally need serious talks between Washington and Moscow.
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Everything will not be different after this presidential election.
We Europeans have our homework to do, the world will not wait for us.
We can, however, have the hope that with Joe Biden the course of the current president against international cooperation, multilateralism and the ability of international organizations to work will come to an end.
Like hardly any other active US politician, Biden knows the value of a foreign policy that wins allies and integrates partners instead of viewing the world as an arena of everyone against everyone.
Such a policy requires mutual trust.
Joe Biden has earned our trust, Europe's trust.
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