The global pincer movement of Trump and Xi has ensnared the EU.
The declared hostility between Washington and Beijing is shaping the international order today. And although the European Union is trying to escape the logic of blogs, its own weakness subordinates it to a reality defined by this confrontation. The trade war between the United States and China has a long list of collateral victims who are breathing a sigh of relief after the truce announced by Donald Trump and Xi Jinping on restrictions to rare earth exports. Beijing confirmed on Saturday that this one-year delay will also apply to the European Union, which thus manages to reduce the pressure that threatened its manufacturers of cars, wind turbines, computers, and other technological products that saw their rare earth stockpiles endangered.
The EU is buying time, but from a position of weakness that it doesn't know how to reverse. Europe has spent years seeking its own space in this hyperconnected world. But the reality is that the Union has been caught in the global pincer movement of Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
The subordination of European defense to US military capabilities is the first of the cross-cutting weaknesses that determine the EU's vassalage to Trump. Sources within the European Commission acknowledge that the US commitment to NATO and arms sales to Ukraine weighed heavily in the tariff agreement signed in August.
Furthermore, Washington is pressuring Brussels to favor Silicon Valley giants. The words of Vice President and MAGA movement ideologue JD Vance at the last Munich Security Conference, in which he accused the EU of being undemocratic for attempting to regulate the monopolistic power of large technology platforms, were the first warning of an increasingly direct attack strategy against European digital legislation. The Union, which has lost its capacity to influence the transformation of its immediate neighborhood, is instead witnessing how the ideological agenda of the major digital powers and their ability to algorithmically determine the spaces for collective debate is changing the European sociopolitical landscape, especially among the younger population.
Washington is also pressuring against EU proposals to cut greenhouse gas emissions. European officials who participated last month in the International Maritime Organization meeting in London to negotiate a plan to reduce emissions from the shipping sector have denounced that their American counterparts resorted to personal threats to prevent a vote. But environmental organizations accuse Ursula von der Leyen's team of quickly sacrificing their climate commitments to appease Trump.
The President of the European Commission prioritizes avoiding confrontation. But the room for maneuver is narrowing in both the East and the West. China has also imposed conditions considered abusive by European companies and is demanding the removal of tariffs on its electric cars and steel. Von der Leyen, for her part, accuses Beijing of flooding world markets with subsidized overproduction. However, despite the harsh rhetoric, the EU is entirely dependent on China to implement much of the green transformation it has championed so far. Since 2022, the EU has increased its imports of solar panels produced in the Asian country by 121%.
Neither global trade uncertainties nor the Trumpian tariff threats that both sides are trying to weather have managed to reduce the mutual tension that the EU and China have been experiencing for years. Europe is a necessary power: the leading trading partner of both the United States and China, who nevertheless treat it as a minor power.
Beyond the existential pessimism provoked by the contempt of its historical ally, and the effects of what some experts call "brutal geopolitics," made up of hard power and ruthless individualism, the European Union needs to clarify and reach a consensus, above all, on what it means to be European in this world, what its position is in relation to the United States. Without a clear answer to these dilemmas, the European Union will remain a dependent power, trapped in the strategic confrontation between China and the United States. And both are using it in their strategy to consolidate their global hegemony.