Meet the Diplomat Who Shaped Biden’s Global Economic Policy

In the fall of 2022, two top Biden administration officials met in New York with a key European diplomat. Over dinner outdoors, they strategized about how best to throttle Russia’s oil revenues in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine.

Near the end of what had been a collegial meal, the European official, Bjoern Seibert, dropped a bombshell on his hosts, Mike Pyle of the National Security Council and Wally Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary. Europe, Mr. Seibert said, had big problems with President Biden’s sweeping new climate law.

Mr. Seibert, the head of cabinet for the president of the European Commission, said top officials among European Union member states feared Mr. Biden was trying to drive a competitive wedge between their countries and the United States, by lavishing subsidies on made-in-America clean energy technology. They were worried the president was trying to ensure the future of U.S. manufacturing at the expense of some of America’s closest allies.

The exchange set off months of behind-the-scenes talks, a major regulatory concession from the Treasury Department and high-level negotiations between Mr. Biden and fellow world leaders, all meant to soothe those concerns.

The officials at that dinner worked to pull together a harmonized industrial strategy between wealthy nations. It seeks to boost technology that reduces greenhouse gas emissions, limit global warming and counter China’s manufacturing might in global markets.

That effort appears to have partly repaired a trans-Atlantic rift over what Europe sees as America’s increasingly protectionist economic policies.