For months since the return of US President Donald Trump, there has been a roaring trade in papers and speeches about how to make Europe a truly independent geopolitical player.
The term “strategic autonomy”, championed by the French government during Trump’s first term, is back in vogue.
But the independence movement was on the ropes this week, when a series of summits thrust Europe’s weakness on global affairs into the spotlight ahead of a bout of engagement with China.
On Monday, a meeting of the European Union’s foreign ministers exposed the bloc’s impotence on the ongoing crises in the Middle East. On Tuesday and Wednesday, meanwhile, the world watched as European leaders fawned over Trump to try to keep him engaged at the annual Nato summit in The Hague.
WhatsApp groups across Europe lit up after Trump published text messages from Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, telling him that he was “flying into another big success”. They lit up again after he called Trump “daddy” a day later.
“Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win,” wrote Rutte, who spent 14 years as the Dutch prime minister until last July, while only once hitting Nato’s defence spending targets.
On to Thursday and a European Council summit in Brussels, where national leaders flip-flopped on whether they could accept a trade deal with Trump that would maintain a base-rate tariff.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen then bamboozled observers by suggesting the bloc team up with members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) to bring the World Trade Organization back to life – even though the EU is not part of the agreement.
According to a diplomatic source, at least one national leader emerged from this part of the meeting – from which phones and aides were banned – asking what the CPTPP was.
“Europe is completely irrelevant – I think even they themselves stopped pretending that they matter,” a second frustrated European diplomat said.
A third diplomat from France said the week was “really bad”, but summoned some gallows humour nonetheless. “We French joke these days that the only worse thing than penniless French diplomacy is EU diplomacy.”
All of this happened on the cusp of a ramp-up in contact with China. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi will tour Brussels, Berlin and Paris next week, while the bloc’s institutional leaders will travel to China next month for a two-day summit.
Given the outcomes of the past week’s meetings, Beijing may well be pleased. Observers in Brussels already suspected that China harboured doubts about Europe’s geopolitical credibility, a sentiment that would have only grown over recent days.
Despite Nato’s much-publicised Asia pivot, there was no mention of China in the truncated Nato statement, despite China being named as a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war on Ukraine in last year’s communique. Leaders from Japan and South Korea, meanwhile, skipped the summit after the US’ bombing of Iran.
There was also no mention of China in the conclusions of the European Council summit, despite efforts from some EU member states to name it alongside Belarus, Iran and North Korea. Most notably, China was absent from a line that “condemns the continued military support” those countries give to Moscow.
One of the chief opponents to naming China in the statement was Germany, diplomatic sources said. Berlin beat back a push from several others during ambassadors’ meetings in Brussels this week, suggesting that Merz’s new government may not be making the big shift on Beijing that some hawks had hoped for.
China was discussed at the European Council, in relation to its support for Russia, its strained trade relations with Europe, and its growing competitiveness on technology. A clear theme, said a diplomat briefed on the discussion, was that EU leaders feared “living in a world dominated by China.”
But Beijing’s leadership was unlikely to lose much sleep over that, observers said. Instead, some raised concerns that last week’s mess did not bode well for the coming month of summitry with China.
Sven Biscop, a geopolitical analyst at the Egmont Institute, a Belgian think tank, said that the events at Nato would come back to haunt Europe and that both the US and China would see the bloc as less serious.
“Grovelling doesn’t buy you anything – Trump expects that anyway, so you don’t get rewarded. It’s also bad for our reputation in the rest of the world,” Biscop said.
Ed Arnold, a security analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, criticised Nato’s decision to ignore China, adding that the event “exposed [Europe’s] total psychological dependency on the US.”
He also took aim at the reduction of the main plenary session to just “2½ hours to accommodate Trump, giving each ally less than five minutes airtime each.”
“The government of the Netherlands estimates that the cost of the most expensive summit thus far will be €183.4 million (US$214.7 million) – or €1.2 million per minute – making it a serious contender for being the most expensive meeting ever held anywhere in the world,” Arnold wrote.
The disarray was also noticed in Beijing. “Nato summit’s viral ‘Daddy’ joke exposes Europe’s sidelined agenda,” state news agency Xinhua said in one headline above an article that contended: “The summit reflected Nato’s shift toward US-centric theatrics, with Europe’s core concerns largely pushed aside.”
Others were less glum about the bigger picture. After all, Nato has secured Trump’s buy-in for another year and European governments pledged to make what many consider to be essential increases in defence spending.
The general orientation on the European side right now is: don’t do stupid things that blow everything up
Andrew Small, German Marshall Fund
“The general orientation on the European side right now is: don’t do stupid things that blow everything up. Try and keep things predictable. Do damage limitation. Manage things carefully,” said Andrew Small, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund for the United States.
“If you went back to the beginning of the year and said, ‘this is where we’re going to be at the beginning of July’, I think people would have taken that.”