If China no longer takes Europe seriously, Brussels has itself to blame

South China Morning Post

a day ago

The China-EU
summit on July 24 confirmed what Beijing and Washington have long surmised: Europe has sidelined itself from great-power competition. After five decades of diplomacy, Brussels and Beijing have never been further apart, exactly as Trump's wedge intended. Yet the bridge to China wasn't demolished from abroad. Europe dismantled it, piece by piece, through its own incoherence.
Brussels' only meaningful gain was a
marginal agreement on rare earths . The European Union's other concerns, ending China's 'systemic distortions and growing manufacturing overcapacity', were unaddressed. Instead, the EU walked away with hollow climate declarations and technical scraps. This confirms that China sees no need to concede anything substantial: a passivity that exposes Europe's irrelevance.
Washington engineered this outcome with precision. Trump's tariff threats had seemed to corner Brussels into a false dilemma: either prioritise commercial ties with China or reinforce transatlantic loyalty. The set-up succeeded.
The summit laid bare Europe's misreading of geopolitical reality. The EU continues to act as a liberal power in a realist international system. Its principles – multilateralism, consensus and legalism – unravel when confronted with raw power politics. Trump exploits this mismatch, trapping Brussels and exposing its
failure to define an autonomous stance
At the last
Nato summit , European members increased their military dependence on the transatlantic alliance. Trump's attempts to
fracture Nato only yielded a more submissive Europe. Brussels aligned without protest to a defence spending increase worth 5 per cent of gross domestic product through 2035, effectively binding Europe to the US security-industrial complex.