The cover story of our latest issue explores how the EU has become 'collateral damage' in the US-China trade war, while other features examine Russia's expanding drone war in Europe and Ukraine's shifting front lines.
Once again, Europe finds itself paying the price for a confrontation it didn’t choose. Beijing’s decision earlier this year to weaponise rare earths in its trade standoff with Washington was a stark reminder that the continent’s prosperity still depends, to a troubling degree, on the actions of others.
Rare earths — vital to the EU’s energy transition and its defence buildup — underpin everything from wind turbines and electric vehicles to guided missiles. When China tightened export controls in response to Donald Trump’s tariffs, Europe’s factories felt the shock immediately. Even the late-October detente between Trump and China’s Xi Jinping did little to change the uncomfortable truth: Europe stands in the crossfire of a superpower rivalry over which it has little control.
As former EU diplomat Gunnar Wiegand told The Parliament’s Federica Di Sario for this month’s cover story, “Europe increasingly finds itself in a position it never wanted to be in…the battleground of the strategic rivalry between the US and China.”
That awkward position has laid bare not only the continent’s economic dependence but also its structural fragility. For all its talk of “strategic autonomy,” the EU remains constrained by the very dependencies it spent decades cultivating.
Efforts like Ursula von der Leyen’s new RESourceEU initiative, which promises to stockpile and diversify critical minerals, are welcome — but they also underscore how far behind Europe finds itself in its push to ‘de-risk’ from Beijing. The Anti-Coercion Instrument — the EU’s so-called trade bazooka — was meant to signal a Europe ready to defend itself. Yet it has never been fired.
The problem, though, runs deeper than trade. The rare-earth dispute is merely the latest reminder that Europe no longer sets the pace of global events. From Beijing and Washington’s economic coercion to Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine — and the steady drumbeat of hybrid attacks designed to erode Western resolve — the EU is locked in a world shaped by actors who view interdependence not as stability, but as leverage.
The world has entered an age of coercion, where power is measured less by principle than by pressure. Unless Europe learns to wield its own, it will remain what it has too often become in recent years: a bystander to its own fate.
— Christopher Alessi, Editor-in-Chief