Exploring the Transatlantic Meaning of China and Russia: divergence, convergence and future prospects in the Biden Era

Despite Joe Biden’s election victory bringing a Europe-friendly president to power in Washington D.C., transatlantic relations are undergoing a period of uncertainty amidst tense great-power relations and crises of international order. Against this backdrop, the present article explores the transatlantic meaning of the United States’ and the European Union’s relationships with China and Russia from the latter part of the 2010s until the end of Biden’s first year in office. By studying the dominant elite discourses vis-à-vis these two great powers in the US and the EU, respectively, the paper investigates how understandings of these vital, yet problematic relationships possibly converge and diverge on the two sides of the Atlantic. In the end, the complementary and contested transatlantic meanings of China and Russia serve as prisms for analysing the current state and future prospects of great-power and transatlantic relations in a more contentious 21st-century international order.