With only a few months left in office, US President Joe Biden is going on a farewell tour. Having postponed his original visit because of Hurricane Milton, he will be in Germany on October 18.
Biden is to become the first US president since George H. W. Bush to be awarded the Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will present the award to honor the US president’s “services to the German-US friendship and the transatlantic alliance, which Biden has shaped … and strengthened over five decades,” Germany’s Presidential Office had said in a statement released before the originally planned visit earlier this month.
The US-Europe relationship, and particularly the US-Germany relationship, has been near and dear to Biden. The end of his presidency will mark the end of an era. Will he be the last transatlantic president?
“I think that’s a fair assessment,” Michelle Egan, a professor at American University in Washington and an expert on US-European relations, told DW. “That’s probably because of his long engagement through NATO, through the
Munich Security Conference, through being on the [US Senate] Foreign Relations Committee and knowing a lot of leaders in Europe prior to becoming president.”
What made Biden a transatlantic president?
Biden was born in 1942 and grew up in a country that helped West Germany rebuild after the Second World War. After the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, he witnessed West Germany become one of the US’ most important partners in the Cold War.
“He has been in politics since 1972 and was clearly shaped in its early days, in the foreign policy realm at least, by the experience of the Cold War and Germany being the centerpiece of that conflict,” said Peter Sparding of the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress (CSPC).
Biden’s experience of foreign policy was also crucial when he was Barack Obama’s vice president.
“Obama was very limited in terms of his foreign policy knowledge,” said Egan. “That was the reason Biden was put on the ticket. Biden had the connections, the knowledge, the briefings due to his Senate role.”
She added that Obama was very popular in Europe because he helped to rebuild the transatlantic relationship after George W. Bush’s presidency, but it was Biden who had an emotional connection to the continent.
