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The Biden administration is back on the international stage with Aplomb.
In early April, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen made proposals to tax multinational corporations, including a global minimum tax rate of 21 percent.
And last week, President Joe Biden invited 40 heads of state and government to a virtual climate summit.
After four years of rather confrontational foreign policy under Donald Trump, America is returning to tried and tested multilateralism.
Europeans can breathe a sigh of relief.
If only it were like that.
Because on closer inspection it is by no means the case that with these initiatives the USA slipped back into the role of the disinterested defender of global - i.e. western values - (if it ever held this role).
In essence, this is also primarily about American interests.
Ludovic Subran, chief economist at Allianz
Source: Alliance
This is easy to see in the tax question.
The Biden administration is planning a hefty tax hike for companies to finance their ambitious infrastructure program.
International loopholes can only be a nuisance.
Because even now the big US tech companies in particular are paying significantly less taxes than even the low rates under Trump provide by taking advantage of the confusing international tax system with its numerous oases.
In order to achieve its own goals - significantly higher tax revenues - the US needs international support.
That's really behind it
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It is not much different with US climate policy. Of course, it is also important to the USA to avert the existential threat to humanity at the last minute. But something else is still in the foreground: It's about American jobs. In Europe, Biden's climate policy or infrastructure plan is often spoken of; President Biden himself has given this policy a different name: American Jobs Plan.
In fact, the new administration - despite the new reduction target of halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 - does not have a consistent climate policy. Nowhere is this clearer than in the large blank space in the plan: The US has no ambitions whatsoever to introduce a CO2 tax - the holy grail of climate policy, so to speak. Instead, a lot of money should be used to initiate innovations and investments in order to make the economy climate-neutral by 2050; this should be achieved for electricity generation as early as 2035.
So not the carrot and stick, the classic European approach to climate issues - just the carrot.
And the pie for American companies, the bigger - and the number of jobs created - the more American green technology can be used not just in the United States but around the world.
Behind the new impetus to make the Paris Climate Agreement a success, there is also the intention to achieve global leadership in a key future technology, environmental technology.
In other words, it is another area of the American-Chinese struggle for hegemony.
And the Americans show that it is not only the Chinese who understand state capitalism.
Europe must find its own voice in the concert of the great powers
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What follows from this, for the climate and for Europe? First of all, the climate. He doesn't care about the motives behind the new American policy. The only decisive factor is that the historically largest emitter of harmful greenhouse gases finally accepts its responsibility and presents a serious and promising plan to achieve the global climate targets. After his democratic predecessors failed with their plans for a CO2 tax in Congress, the new pragmatism of the Biden administration is to be welcomed, which does not care about theoretically clean political concepts, but wants to produce results - for the climate and for the people.
And Europe? Still faced with the task of finding one's own voice to be heard in the concert of the great powers. Even under President Biden, the old-style multilateralism, as a rule-based order to which every country submits for the benefit of all, is a thing of the past. Europe's interests can only defend Europe itself, be it against China, Russia or even the USA. In this sense, the last four years under Trump were not a brief nightmare from which Europe has now awakened, but the beginning of a new era, European apprenticeships in geopolitics for the 21st century.
But Europe should also learn from the USA on climate issues.
It is not enough to exhaust oneself in ideological or moral climate debates or to conjure up supposed fears or generation conflicts.
Instead, politics must show how the green transformation is helping people here and now;
and this means first and foremost job creation.
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With the NextGenerationEU program, the EU already has an instrument that, similar to the Biden Plan in the USA - albeit on a somewhat more modest scale - could develop precisely this boosting effect.
It just needs to be implemented, and quickly.
At the moment, however - as with the vaccination campaign - it looks like Europe will stumble over its bureaucratism.
Who would have thought that, as a European, one would look at America in admiration again so quickly and wish at least a little of one's pragmatism, of this let's-do-it mentality, for Europe as well.
Ludovic Subran is Allianz's chief economist.