Debate: EU-US relations
Date: TUESDAY, 12 DECEMBER 2023
Speaker: Josep Borrell Fontelles
Language: EN

Your first new recommendation, you said, and I quote, ‘fostering an even stronger, mutually beneficial partnership in leadership and responsibility between the US and the EU, to defend multilateralism’ – something that we repeat all the time – ‘to tackle the global challenges and the new and dangerous realities.’ Yes, this reflects the roadmap for the US partnership, a partnership that is more necessary than ever if we want to achieve our objectives. Take into consideration that our trade and investment relation is the most important relationship in the world. We are each other’s main trading partner and we are each other’s largest investors, accounting for 42% of the global GDP in 2021 in current prices. There is not another economic relationship as strong as the one that we have with the US, or that the US has with us. There are challenges in this area, but we are working in order to build constructively on them. That is why we have this Trade and Technology Council to look for solutions and to avoid new dispute. In your report, you mentioned the main challenges that you consider in the relationship. And I quote again, ‘the multiple global crises, from the war of Russia against Ukraine and tensions in the Middle East’ – we have been talking a lot about it today – ‘and an increasingly assertive China’. These are the three poles in which we have to concentrate our attention: China, Middle East, Ukraine. This is, by the way, the challenges that I mentioned last month to our ambassadors conference during our yearly gathering. I have been in contact with Secretary of State Blinken over the recent weeks, discussing about that, preparing the summit with China and, in particular, encouraging the US to work closely with us on the Middle East, because we have both committed to a Palestinian state, and the US has been devoting a lot of attention in the past to this issue. Not today exactly, but the recent events will make them go back again to this issue, and we cannot just rely on them to solve it. It is the whole international community that has to engage on trying to enable both Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace. I am also encouraged by your call for consolidating our multiple strands of engagement with the US: the high-level dialogues on China and Russia, the high-level consultation on the Indo-Pacific, the very close cooperation on different foreign policy files, on the Western Balkans, where our cooperation is very good and decisive to the Caucasus or to Central Asia. In particular, our dialogue on China, which Secretary Blinken and I launched in Brussels in March 2021, has been a dedicated bilateral forum to discuss our responses to, as I said before, a more and more assertive China. Both of us are very well aware that our interests are not always overlapping, but this consultation has been proving useful to compare where we go in our engagement with China. Your report also talks about cybersecurity, defence policy, counter-terrorism, space, non-proliferation, disarmament. We also have a formal and intense security and defence dialogue, which convened most recently in early December in Washington, D.C. What is happening today? The most important thing, maybe, is the review of the US Congress of the funding for Ukraine. I know that the Ukrainians are very much worried by that and it is important that we recall our unwavering commitment to support Ukraine, as we said, for as long as it takes, not as long as it took, ‘as it takes’ – not in the past, in the present and in the future. Our efforts to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia’s war of aggression have been part of our joint endeavour with the US from the first day of the full invasion, and we expect this to continue. But it certainly will depend on the electoral processes. In November next year, we will know who’s going to be the next President of the US, and certainly it will be of utmost importance to define our cooperation and the engagement of the US with respect to the support of Ukraine.  We expect this to continue, and I clearly support your clear message that our engagement in the Middle East must not be detrimental to our support to Ukraine. There are a lot of differences, but also a lot of coincidences or convergences in these two wars. And it is important that the fact that we have to face both of them at the same time is an important part of our US-EU relations.