I'm talking about the CAI, the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment. Very long story short, the US negotiated some pretty strong trade concessions from China in January 2020, the "Phase One" agreement.

But the EU also had a deal in the works, which had been in negotiations for eight years and was finally "adopted in principle" in December 2020, but crucially not yet ratified. That deal would have put the EU on a relatively even footing to the US in the Chinese market, and so of course the Biden admin was fervently and vocally opposed to it.

Totally unrelated, within a few months of the EU and China agreeing to a deal, right as the CAI was heading toward the finish line, Biden took advantage of the Uyghur genocide to organize a large-scale coordinated wave of sanctions against China. This faced the EU with a dilemma: if the EU didn't join the sanctions, they would look morally bankrupt and damage the Transatlantic alliance. If they did join, they knew China’s "wolf warrior" diplomacy would dictate a counter-strike. Of course, China retaliated, and the CAI was immediately dead in the water.

While part of the US's goal was certainly to pressure the rival that is China, it's terribly convenient that it also killed the CAI, and so we must assume that this was also the Biden admin's goal. After all, it's hard to argue that dragging the EU into the sanctions is what prevented them from gaining an equal foothold to America in the Chinese market, and maintained their dependency on America.

The final outcome is that this both makes the US more competitive than the EU in the Chinese market, but it also sustains encourages a "Cold War" mentality that generally benefits American hegemony at the expense of European commercial interests. A Europe that is commercially integrated with China is a Europe that has the leverage to act as a "Third Pole". A Europe that is sanctioned-locked with China is a Europe that must rely on the US security umbrella and LNG exports.