Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zazana Munchang and Jack Smith.

Today we would like to talk about U.S. European relations following this week's elections

and following the U.S. inflation reduction act. Both of these events and in the second case, the law, will have very serious implication

of you on this relationship. Jack, what do you think, where are we now? I mean, we didn't

have the sort of the Republican, the red wave that didn't happen. Is this necessarily good news

for the Europeans or is this or is the picture more differentiated

here? I think the picture is more differentiated. The first thing to say is that on a number of

different fronts for the European Union, a Democratic administration is simply just going to be a lot easier to work with.

I mean, to the extent that a Republican one would be almost unworkable at this point.

One of them, obviously, is the fact that the Republicans have, during the time that Donald

Trump has effectively captured the party, taking quite an isolationist turn on foreign policy.

So this whole kind of America first, I'm personally hesitant to describe it as a major,

a really major substantive shift from where, say, Obama was, because even at that point during the

Obama administration, there was a sense that the U.S. wanted to pull a little bit away

from being involved in transatlantic politics and wanted to focus more on the Indo-Pacific.

But obviously, that accelerated under Trump, and there was also a stylistic difference, to put it

mildly. Then you added to the fact that one of the major geopolitical issues the EU now

has to face into is climate change. And that is something where, I mean, the Republicans,

it's not just they're on a different planet, they're in a different galaxy on that one.

So very hard to kind of deal with an interlocutor when you have this major priority and the other

side just doesn't take it seriously at all.

So with that said, I think this is certainly not the worst case scenario for the EU because

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