David Hutt
Today, the United States’ relations with Central Europe are at an inflection point. Much of the recent media coverage in the region has focused on how Washington’s influence might wane if President Joe Biden picks a fight with the governments of Hungary and Poland, whose leaders had cultivated close ties with Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump. On the campaign trail, Biden bemoaned the recent trajectory of democratic decline and the erosion of checks and balances on executive power in those countries. Meanwhile, illiberal leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski are suspicious of Biden’s pledges to make human rights and the rule of law key pillars of U.S. foreign policy, viewing such efforts as affronts to their sovereignty.As the Atlantic Council’s Petr Tuma noted in December, some observers in Central and Eastern Europe also fear that after a period of “intensified cooperation” under Trump, America could revert back to the era of President Barack Obama, “when many believed Washington (initially) sacrificed the region’s interests in the name of a reset with Moscow.” In reality, though, Biden has given no sign of any such attempt at a reset, signaling he will take a tough approach toward Russia. And even as Biden seeks to reorient U.S. foreign policy away from his predecessor’s approach, the Trump administration has actually left a solid foundation of trust and cooperation for Biden to build upon in Central Europe.
Since 2017, all of the leaders from the “Visegrad Four”—the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland—have visited Washington, while Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, toured each of their capitals. U.S. trade with the region is up across the board, and Washington has signed new security pacts with Poland and Hungary. And all except Budapest have backed Washington’s pressure campaign against the controversial Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.
During his first weeks in office, Biden has focused more on reassuring Western European partners, holding calls with the leaders of Germany, France and the United Kingdom, as well the NATO secretary general. But having served as the main interlocutor for Central and Eastern Europe as vice president under Obama, Biden knows well the region’s strategic importance. Its natural aversion to Russian influence tends to suit U.S. interests. And China, America’s main strategic competitor, has built up its investment and influence in the region, backed by a powerful section of the Central European political elite.
Improving relations with the region won’t require a great deal of heavy lifting from Biden’s administration—a rare benefit as it faces numerous intractable problems across the world. In fact, in many policy areas, Biden can largely pick up where the Trump administration left off.
The first such area is energy investments, chiefly in nuclear energy, which most of the region’s governments reckon is their only way to quickly end fossil-fuel dependency and meet the European Union’s aggressive targets to cut carbon emissions. They are also wary about becoming dependent on Russian or Chinese energy firms.
Last February, Pompeo pledged up to $1 billion toward the “Three Seas Initiative,” which aims to facilitate energy and infrastructure cooperation between 12 European states, including the Visegrad Four. From the Trump camp’s perspective, this was also a means of simultaneously countering Russia’s energy dominance and China’s overseas infrastructure investments through its Belt and Road Initiative. Later in 2020, Romania’s state-owned nuclear power firm ceased discussions with a Chinese state-run energy company over the construction of two reactors at its Cernavoda Nuclear Power Plant, later signing an agreement with the U.S. to take over the project.
In October, Washington sealed a deal with Warsaw to cooperate on developing Poland’s civil nuclear energy program. And the Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse Electric Corporation is one of five prospective bidders to refurbish the Czech Republic’s aging nuclear power plant in Dukovany, a project valued at more than $7 billion. That would make it the country’s most expensive infrastructure investment on record. The Czech government recently decided to sideline Chinese firms from the project’s contracting process, due to national security concerns, and Czech leaders are discussing whether to do the same for Russian companies.
Building off of these developments, the Biden administration could make further investments in deepening energy ties with Central Europe, either bilaterally or through the Three Seas Initiative, which has bipartisan support. A resolution from Congress in October approved of the Three Seas Initiative’s “efforts to increase energy independence and infrastructure connectivity thereby strengthening the United States and European national security.” Biden’s environmental agenda could also attract interest from the region, especially if the U.S. were to invest more money abroad in renewable energy projects.
Even as Biden seeks to reorient U.S. foreign policy away from his predecessor’s approach, Trump has left a foundation of trust and cooperation for Biden to build on in Central Europe.
Here, the Biden administration’s tone on China will play a role in shaping the reaction from its European counterparts. A less belligerent approach to Beijing would endear Biden to the Central European states, which cannot overlook Beijing’s considerable offers of investment and trade. They have also, on occasion, felt confined by overt American pressure to disassociate from China.
Another potential area of cooperation is defense, mainly aimed at countering Russia’s activities. This is a field that Biden has ample experience with, having served as vice president in 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and began ramping up military activities in eastern Ukraine. Biden was one of the architects of what was then called the European Reassurance Initiative, a push to bolster the U.S. security presence in Europe in response to Russia’s aggression, including by stationing around 4,500 American troops in Poland on a rotational basis.
That number is set to rise to 5,500 under a bilateral agreement that was finalized during the final months of the Trump administration. While Biden announced last week that he is reversing Trump’s decision to move 12,000 troops out of Germany—some of which were slated to redeploy elsewhere in Europe, including Poland—he is unlikely to alter the defense pacts Trump signed with Poland and with Hungary, nor is he expected to interfere with planned sales of U.S. military equipment to those countries.
Ultimately, Biden’s tougher views on Moscow will endear him toward the Central European states, especially Poland. The four states are among the most passionate members of the NATO defense pact, which Biden has called “the most effective political-military alliance in modern history,” whereas Trump disparaged it as “obsolete.”
The last major issue—which could wind up being more a point of friction than cooperation—is democracy and human rights, a subject that the Trump administration seldom touched. In fact, his administration was seen by some commentators in the region as encouraging the authoritarian tendencies of the Hungarian and Polish governments. Biden, however, has vowed to put democratic values back at the heart of U.S. policy.
If the Biden administration is serious, however, it will need to find a way to speak up for the interests of the region’s liberal democrats while maintaining cordial terms with the governments of Poland and Hungary. The U.S. will need to closely cooperate with the European Union on these matters. One potentially novel approach would be to boost engagement with sub-national levels of government in Central Europe, especially the liberal mayors of Prague, Warsaw, Bratislava and Budapest who in December 2019 signed the “Pact of Free Cities” to forge a united front against their illiberal populist national governments.
The Biden camp would also do well to remember that one size doesn’t fit all in Central Europe. Democratic standards have massively deteriorated in Hungary and Poland in recent years, but there has been a little-noticed political renaissance in Slovakia since 2018, sparked by the assassination of an investigative journalist that year. In the Czech Republic, meanwhile, political pluralism remains intact.
The biggest danger is entropy. If the new Biden administration is too distracted by domestic affairs and other pressing global issues during its first year in office, it may overlook Central Europe and allow the new initiatives and pacts that it inherited to go unfulfilled. This would be a missed opportunity; some of the region’s most prominent pro-China politicians, such as Czech President Milos Zeman, have recently reconsidered their positions because many of Beijing’s promises have turned out to be hollow. Biden should take care so as not to disappoint in his follow-through on new U.S. dealings with Central Europe.
David Hutt is a political journalist based between France and the Czech Republic,reporting on European political affairs and EU-Asian relations. He was previously based for the past five years in Cambodia, reporting on Southeast Asian affairs. He is the Southeast Asia columnist at The Diplomat and a correspondent for Asia Times, and also writes for other international publications.
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