Austria and America
The prospects for US-Austrian relations look better today on the day of Joe Biden's inauguration than they did four years ago
Servus!
Later today, Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States and transatlantic relations will be reset. The incoming president looks forward to revitalizing and reinvigorating “the transatlantic relationship, including through NATO and the European Union,” he told French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Angela Merkel during phone calls held in the days following his election. Biden has already pledged to take America back into the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA).
If the Obama years were characterized by a perceived indifference towards Europe amid talk of a ‘pivot to Asia,’ the Trump administration was a hostile, destructive force. Austria, it can be said, was spared the worst. It was not visited with an ambassador as contentious as Richard Grenell, who spent two acrimonious years in Berlin during which US-German relations were at their postwar nadir. Rather, Washington dispatched a legacy appointment in the form of the tech entrepreneur and investor Trevor Triana, who by now should have departed Vienna for his $35 million San Francisco mansion.
The Trump White House seemed to have hopes for Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz. “Look, I think Kurz is a rockstar. I’m a big fan,” Grenell told Breitbart back in 2018. But the extent to which those hopes and America’s diplomatic efforts bore fruit is unclear. Under American pressure, Zurich Insurance, Det Norske Veritas Holding AS, and Ramboll have cut ties with the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, yet the Austrian oil and gas giant OMV remains an invested partner. Washington was also unable to stop Austria adopting a digital services tax that adversely effects American tech giants like Google and Facebook.
Kurz would visit the White House in 2019. “We have a tremendous relationship, long term, with Austria,” Trump said at the time vaguely. The chancellor’s jaunt to DC was a matter of some controversy in Austria, though to revisit the notes from that meeting is to see that, at least in front of the press, Kurz kept his cards close to his chest. He didn’t really say anything of substance at all. He did not critique American policy to the president’s face or play power politics in the style of Macron, though neither did he go out of his way to lavish praise upon Trump as British prime minister Boris Johnson has done.
Kurz is bound by Austria’s role in international affairs—that of a mid-sized European nation, a bridge-builder, and a hub for international institutions—as well as by his own pragmatism and realism. In 2018, for example, Kurz cautioned against booting Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz out of the European People’s Party at a time when then-president Jean-Claude Juncker favored their expulsion. His posture towards Trump was another example of Kurz making do with whomever is in power.
Certainly, with Biden’s inauguration, the prospects for US-Austrian relations look better today than they did four years ago. One of Austria’s leading political analysts Peter Filzmaier has said that Biden represents a better choice for Austria for a multiplicity of reasons including that the White House will no longer be occupied by someone actively seeking to undermine international institutions like the EU and UN.
Vienna’s man in Washington Martin Weiss spoke hopefully in a recent interview of the Biden administration becoming more constructively involved in the western Balkans, a region in which Vienna is deeply investing both economically and diplomatically as it tries to shepherd it towards integration into the EU. Austria also wants an end to the trade war instigated by the Trump administration, and in particular, a repeal of the steel and aluminum tariffs imposed in 2018.
Bis bald!
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Lockdown Extended
Austria’s third lockdown will now end on February 8 and not January 25 as previously planned. FFP2 masks will be mandatory in supermarkets, post offices, and drug stores and on public transport and Austrians will be required to keep 2 meters (6.5 ft) apart in public spaces. Kurz said Sunday that if the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is approved by European regulatory authorities at the end of January, all Austrian residents over the age of 65 should vaccinated by the end of March.
Prayer Evening Criticized
The Austrian parliament spent €10,000 ($12,000) organizing and hosting a prayer event in December, the parliament’s president Wolfgang Sobotka disclosed. The opposition criticized the event as a waste of taxpayer money that violated the neutrality of the Austrian state when it comes to matters of religion.
Green Deputy Demoted
Ewa Ernst-Dziedzic is out as deputy head of the Greens’ parliamentary party. The Polish-born MP had clashed with the Greens’ coalition partner, the People’s Party (ÖVP), over the issue of refugees. Ernst-Dziedzic will be succeeded by Meri Disoski, who ran Maria Vassilakou’s office when she was Vienna’s deputy mayor from 2010 to 2019.