Alina Polyakova is president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis. Alexander Gray is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
A geopolitical chestnut holds that the enemy of your enemy is your friend. So it should be as Europe evaluates the Mideast. Iran’s ballistic missiles and nuclear ambitions threaten the West — a threat so serious that the United States and Israel have been bombing the regime for more than two weeks.
Yet curiously some European leaders have sought to use this moment to distance themselves from Washington. That meant slow-walking support for the operation in its early days and, recently, declining to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. More broadly, European nations have expressed a desire to reduce their dependence on U.S. tech and defense. Never mind that without continental alternatives, such “derisking” leads in only one direction: dependence on Iran’s friend China.
The flirtation with Beijing has been underway for months. Earlier this year, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney both tried to court China by visiting the capital in search of trade deals and deeper economic cooperation. Last month, Germany became the first major continental European nation to do likewise, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz seeking to expand economic ties. The rationale: Berlin has a “strategic interest in finding partners in the world who think the way we do,” the chancellor said in a speech ahead of his visit.
But the notion that China thinks like the rest of the world is absurd, a fantasy disproved by the last four decades of Communist Party repression at home and coercion abroad. Beijing isn’t a benevolent or benign actor; it uses its economic weight to hook vulnerable countries and then bend them to its will.
Take Japan’s recent run-in with Beijing’s bullies. Asked in November, the country’s new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, told Parliament that an attack on Taiwan could be “survival-threatening for Japan,” potentially justifying military action. China responded by imposing export controls on raw and critical minerals and restricting tourism to Japan in an overt effort to cripple the island economy.
Beijing used the same tactics after President Donald Trump’s tariffs, cutting the U.S. off from critical magnet supplies. Washington has responded by developing sectors in which China maintains coercive monopolies while diversifying supply chains for critical and raw minerals. Its new Pax Silica initiative, along with the Forum on Resource Geostrategic Engagement, aims to counter Chinese dominance in critical-mineral refining and technology manufacturing through partnerships with allies in the Indo-Pacific.
Whereas the U.S. has the industrial heft to wiggle out of China’s grip, Europe doesn’t. It has no way of replacing the defensive, technological and economic services the U.S. offers without seeking alternatives elsewhere. American tech companies provide more than 70 percent of cloud services in Europe, without which its businesses and consumers couldn’t function. U.S. companies also invest heavily in the European market, employing thousands of the continent’s residents and powering its economies.
While Europe’s leaders bemoan Trump’s rhetoric, the U.S. remains the primary guarantor of European security. Washington is the main provider of the continent’s nuclear deterrent and contributes about 60 percent of NATO’s defense spending. Europe’s militaries depend on U.S. intelligence sharing and weapons, none of which is replaceable in the near term. Despite European states’ progress in security spending, it would take at least two decades and a trillion dollars to replicate what America provides.
Yet even as Europe lags in tech innovation and competitiveness, the U.S. also can’t go it alone when it comes to the competition with China. The U.S.-Europe economic bloc is the largest in the world, accounting for $2 trillion in annual trade in goods and services. Europe is home to some of the most sought-after talent, essential to innovation in emerging tech such as lithography, biotech and quantum computing. These capabilities, combined with U.S. dominance in artificial intelligence, would make a transatlantic tech partnership unbeatable.
Cementing that coalition will require Europe’s taking internal reform seriously. A worthy first step would be to revise European Union regulations that disproportionately burden U.S. tech companies. Through the body’s suite of red tape, including the Digital Markets Act, Brussels levied more than $6.5 billion in fines on American technology firms in 2024 alone — nearly 20 percent of the E.U.’s total tariff revenue.
The E.U.’s Artificial Intelligence Act likewise hampers European innovation by imposing costly compliance requirements that hurt start-ups and small and medium enterprises — many of which are relocating to the U.S. The continent should also take seriously American efforts to build global partnerships and invest in resilient supply chains for critical minerals.
Washington can help by reminding allies of our shared strategic objectives. But those nations should already know: Collaborating with a democratic ally, whatever its social media bluster, beats the alternative. They experienced the cost of allying with authoritarians when they were forced to cut themselves off from cheap Russian energy after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. U.S. liquefied natural gas mitigated the damage, but Europeans are still suffering from that disaster in the form of higher energy prices.
The pain from courting Beijing — whose hold on the continent would be far greater — would be much worse for Europe, the U.S. and the world.
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