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Joe Biden will travel to the UK and Belgium on his first trip abroad as president of the United States in June, as he tries to rejuvenate transatlantic relations after a cooler period under former President Donald Trump.
The White House said Biden would attend the G7 summit in Cornwall, UK, and hold bilateral meetings with other leaders, including British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The president will then travel to the NATO summit in Brussels, before attending a US-EU summit.
Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, said Biden’s trip would “strengthen” the United States’ commitment to multilateralism, as well as NATO and the principle of collective defense.
The Biden administration has made it clear it would like to see a revitalization of the Western military alliance, which had been undermined by factors such as Trump’s attacks, criticism of France’s President Emmanuel Macron, and tensions over Turkey.
During his first official trip to Brussels in March, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken promised to revive Washington’s ties with NATO allies.
In the UK, Biden will debate public health, economic recovery and climate change, according to the White House. The EU-US summit will address the same issues, along with digital and trade cooperation and “mutual foreign policy concerns”.
Washington, Brussels and London have struggled to reach an agreement on a long-running trade dispute over aircraft subsidies. Last month the three parties agreed suspend punitive tariffs to each other for four months while the conversations continued.
The United States has also been at odds with Europe and the United Kingdom for more than a year tax on digital services, and threatened to climb trade tensions setting tariffs on imports from countries with tax measures to established digital services.
More generally, the US and the EU have agreed to work together to address an increasingly assertive China, pledging to restart dialogue on shared issues such as human rights and national security issues.
In March, the United States, the EU, the United Kingdom and Canada imposed sanctions in China for its treatment of Uyghur Muslims in a coordinated action that led to an immediate retaliation of Beijing.
However, one EU-China investment agreement agreed between Brussels and Beijing last December, a few weeks before Biden took office, caused the unhappiness of the then president-elect’s team.
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