President Joe Biden took a veiled swipe at former President Donald Trump as he seeks to differentiate himself on the world stage from the man he replaced in the White House.
“We are committed. We never fully left, but we’re reasserting that fact that it’s overwhelmingly in the interest of the United States of America to have a great relationship with NATO,” he said Tuesday as he arrived at a U.S.-European Union summit. “I have a very different view than my predecessor.”
Biden made the comments as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel led him to a room for his final day of talks in Brussels.
Before the meeting, Biden introduced the EU leaders to his entourage, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and Mark Libby, charge d’affaires of the U.S. mission to the EU.
“I’m leaving out a lot of people here. I apologize. I’m going to get in trouble. But anyway, we’ll get back to that,” Biden said.
Biden then regurgitated economic-themed sections of his 2020 campaign stump speech about growing up in working-class Pennsylvania and Delaware. He also recited an Irish poem, another commonality of his public remarks.
“My friends would kid me in the United States Senate, because I served there, for always quoting Irish poets. They think I quoted Irish poets because I’m Irish,” he said. “I quote them because they’re the best poets.”
After five days in the United Kingdom and two days in Brussels, Biden heads to Geneva, Switzerland, on Tuesday to prepare for his high-stakes meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday.
Biden was tight-lipped about his strategy for Putin during a post-NATO summit press conference on Monday.
“I’ll tell you all that when it’s over,” he said. “The last thing anyone would do is negotiate in front of the world press as to how he’s going to approach a critical meeting with another adversary and/or someone who could be an adversary.”
He added, “But I will tell you this: I’m going to make clear to President Putin that there are areas where we can cooperate if he chooses. And if he chooses not to cooperate and acts in a way that he has in the past, relative to cybersecurity and some other activities, then we will respond. We will respond in kind.”