The European Union (EU) is a major market, and an important technology partner for both the United States and China. It has a long and deep history with both, and figures in Washington’s and Beijing’s geopolitical calculations. While it is admired and taken seriously as a cultural and intellectual power, its hard assets in terms of military and use of force are less impressive. The EU has articulated strategic visions since 2000 which have tried to resolve the tensions in its aims balancing between the United States and China, as the two major powers have grown increasingly competitive and difficult with each other. These have so far proved to be of limited effectiveness. One of the perennial issues for the EU is what its identity is, and what weight to give to its values and worldview as it relates to the other great powers. This essay gives a historical account of how Europe has related to China in the past, how this informs its posture today in the decades since it has been the EU, and what sort of views China and the United States have of it in an era of sharper contention and deeper geopolitical rivalry. It concludes by arguing that a fundamental paradigm change is happening with the second Trump administration, and that Europe needs to become a wholly different actor, and prepare for completely different strategic thinking on its relations with the world’s two superpowers.
Kerry Brown (2026) studied this question.