However when he meets Tuesday with European Union leaders in Brussels, Biden might discover that making up is difficult to do. The possibility of having an accord to solve their differences — and possibly form a united front from the increasingly confrontational China — could be stymied by European disbelief.

Dombrovskis was speaking in part to Trump’s 2018 choice to impose import taxes on foreign steel and aluminum — a determination that abandoned European leaders angry and triggered retaliatory measures against the USA. Biden was slow to take the potential for falling the tariffs, which Trump had enforced on the grounds of”national security”

With trade anxieties still shading the trans-Atlantic connection, the EU can also prove unwilling to combine a U.S.-led attempt to confront China over its provocative commerce policies.

Then there is a longstanding dispute over just how much a government subsidy every side unfairly supplies for its aircraft manufacturing giant — Boeing from the USA and Airbus from the EU.

“This was going on for 17 decades,” says Cecilia Malmström, a veteran of trans-Atlantic conflicts as the European trade commissioner from 2014 to 2019.

All that said, U.S.-EU connections are still sure to become much more demanding than they had been beneath Trump, who routinely accused the Europeans of shirking their obligation to cover their own defense through NATO and of exploiting what he called unjust trade deals to market a lot more products into the United States than they ever purchase.

At a goodwill gesture in March, the Biden government and the EU failed to agree to suspend the tariffs they’d levied on every other at the Airbus-Boeing struggle. Many news outlets have reported that U.S. and EU diplomats are working on a draft communique that could call for its Boeing-Airbus dare to be solved by July 11 and also for the U.S. aluminum and steel tariffs — along with also the EU’s retaliatory sanctions — to be raised by Dec. 1.

The Biden government also declared Friday the Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo will be linking the U.S. delegation; her section administers the aluminum and steel tariffs.

Kelly Ann Shaw, a former Trump management trade official who’s currently a partner in the law firm Hogan Lovells, proposed that the EU and U.S. are happy to move beyond their paychecks battles”so that they can move on and handle any 21st century challenges, not least of which will be China.”