The US Ambassador to the European Union, Mark Gitenstein, has sought to reassure us about the future of transatlantic relations, just a few days before the inauguration of Donald Trump as President.
“What Harry Truman and later Ronald Reagan did with [European] leaders to build a strong transatlantic relationship is essential to our future as citizens on both sides of the Atlantic. And this relationship should not depend on who is President or Secretary of State at any given time”, the ambassador explained to a small group of journalists, including Agence Europe, before his departure.
In his view, the transatlantic relationship “should be in the common security interest of governments and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic”. Gitenstein said the relationship will survive the Trump administration “because the stakeholders in that relationship”, including business and the media, “care”.
After two and a half years in his post, Mr Gitenstein gave a positive assessment of transatlantic relations, quoting a “very senior member of the European Commission” who said that transatlantic relations had “never been better”.
The ambassador highlighted three areas of “success” or progress. Firstly, there is support for Ukraine, including reducing the EU’s dependence on Russian gas, thanks to American LNG.
In addition, “we have made enormous progress in adopting a common approach to the People’s Republic of China and the climate”.
And “we have reached a conceptual consensus on both sides of the Atlantic on the importance of using industrial policy to implement a programme to combat climate change”, explained Mr Gitenstein, despite European reservations about the American Inflation Reduction Act.
Finally, according to the ambassador, the transatlantic partners have managed to reach a consensus on an approach to Gaza and Israel. “This came to a head when (Joe) Biden proposed his hostage exchange solution last summer”, which was supported at the time by European leaders.
Defending independent media. Mr Gitenstein, who now intends to work on media independence, freedom and pluralism – one of his hobbyhorses for years – felt that on both sides of the Atlantic there had been a failure of the media market.
“The business model is broken. This is partly due to the large social media platforms, which have taken a large part of the revenues” of the media, he explained, adding that the only long-term solution was the emergence of “new business models and equity investment”.
“We won’t save much of the media without new policies on risk mitigation factors that make investment in emerging journalism safe”, the ambassador stressed. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)