Can the European Union Lead, or Just React?

May 20, 2025

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The European Union echoes the Austro-Hungarian Empire in its twilight - a once-formidable power paralyzed by contradictions, with 27 competing voices creating a cacophony of strategic impotence. While Vienna obsessed over court protocol as the world transformed around it, Brussels celebrates mandating tethered bottle caps while geopolitical earthquakes reshape the international setting. The Habsburg bureaucracy drowned in minutiae before collapsing; EU institutions seem determined to follow the same fate.

 

This governmental inertia is the result of misguided priorities and a vacuum of direction - best understood by examining the EU's recent four flagship initiatives: its quest for geopolitical relevance, approach to China, response to the war in Ukraine, and push for a green agenda.

 

1. The Geopolitical Commission: Anatomy of Failure

Ursula von der Leyen's 2024 reappointment exemplified Europe's addiction to political expediency over capability - rewarding years of strategic missteps just as the EU confronted the most pressing challenges. The self-proclaimed "geopolitical Commission" promised a Napoleonic vision but delivered bureaucratic myopia. Six years later, that ambition resembles the Maginot Line: impressive on paper, easily circumvented in reality.

 

With the architect of this calamity still commanding the bridge, Brussels wonders why world leaders no longer pick up the calls. Something unheard of in a century of diplomacy: A top envoy visits a counterpart and is left waiting. EU High Representative Kaja Kallas was not even received by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio upon arriving in Washington. Such marginalization is no accident - it was foreshadowed by Donald Trump 2.0, whose foreign policy openly sidelined Europe. What followed was not misfortune but the consequence of EU complacency, poor judgment, and a habit of self-delusion.

 

Indeed, the "Brussels Effect" - the EU rule-making power extending beyond its borders, long touted as its top geopolitical asset - has morphed into the "Brussels Delusion," a regulatory fever where officials mistake paperwork for power. While the EU issues directives on the correct shape of vegetables, Beijing and Washington are locked in the defining geopolitical contest of this century: the race to dominate cutting-edge technology. Without home-grown innovation, Europe is already ensnared in foreign tech dependence.

 

This regulatory hubris corrodes geopolitical strategy: Eurocrats overestimate their leverage while underestimating competitors' resolve. The miscalculation is blunt - assuming market size and historical stature still translate into strategic weight.

 

2. The Illusion of a European China Policy

The EU's approach to China illustrates this deficiency. Confronting the world's second-largest economy without a unified policy has proven disastrous. Chinese officials can hardly hide their amusement when European delegations arrive, preaching liberal values one moment, then begging for market access and manufacturing plants in the next.

 

The flagship "Global Gateway" was meant to be the answer. This initiative was launched with majestic fanfare to rival China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): "We want to create links and not dependencies!" von der Leyen proclaimed in 2021. But it has had the drive of an empire with the budget of a municipal library. Predictably fading into irrelevance, it has been outmatched in both funding and execution. While the BRI channels billions of dollars into roads, ports, and power plants, Global Gateway offers press releases, devoid of the scale or commitment needed to compete. An idea without a plan.

 

Yet rather than reassess, Brussels doubled down. All measures without exception - whether 5G curbs, chip export controls, economic security measures, or electric vehicle (EV) tariffs - consistently followed Washington's lead. Every single one. The Commission repackaged US policies as if they were homegrown, confusing replication with strategy.

 

By late 2024, China was branded "partly malign," an "enabler" of the war in Ukraine, and policymakers began crafting a new "security threat" designation. Just as Brussels escalated rhetoric, Trump's return to power revealed how deeply Europe's position had depended on borrowed American stability. When Washington pivoted its China stance from security to trade, Brussels was left exposed, lacking the means to engage Beijing independently. By April 2025, Europe is forced to share a spot on the multilateralist podium with none other than its "systemic rival," the People's Republic of China.

 

What stands out isn't Europe's vulnerability - it's that its leaders seemed caught off guard by it. Years of subcontracting its China approach to Washington left Brussels with no leverage, no clarity, and no agency. Beijing, once willing to treat Europe as a post-American partner, sees hesitation. Initiatives rise, vanish, and then resurface - without direction or commitment.

 

China, for now, watches. Europe's position - denouncing Chinese economic practices while clinging to Chinese exports - is an incoherent stance that no longer carries weight. The de-risking mantra, sold as a pragmatic shift, is little more than a buzzword masking a harsher reality: Europe lacks the resolution and unity to counter China in any meaningful way. Global Gateway's demise is not an isolated misstep but a symptom of a wider failure: grand announcements, no follow-through, and a worldview shaped more by fantasy than realism.

 

Europe's only path out is to stop the outsourcing strategy. It needs a coherent approach to both Washington and Beijing - less to distance itself from allies than to defend its own interests. Strategic autonomy must move from slogan to instrument. Without this, Europe's irrelevance won't be imposed. It will be chosen.

 

3. The Ukraine War: Europe's Strategic Nakedness Exposed

The management of the Russo-Ukrainian war further reveals the chasm between declared urgency and substantive action. Europe has sanctioned Russia, provided weapons, and sheltered millions of refugees - but for a continent that declared the war "existential" in 2022, the response has been reactive. If Moscow truly threatens Europe's existence, why has there been no move toward a permanent defense council or binding security commitments? Not a single European soldier deployed, yet an unceasing stream of "unwavering support" statements flowing from European capitals - political theater at its finest.

 

Take Spain. Since the war began, the nation has spent 6.9 billion EUR on Russian energy - almost seven times what it has pledged in military aid to Ukraine (1 billion EUR). So for every euro sent to help Kiev resist invasion, seven go straight to "enabling" the invader - using Brussels' lexicon. Meanwhile, the EU debates banning the purchase of Russian vodka or villas, but gas? Perfectly acceptable. As Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen noted, by March 2025 Europe had spent the equivalent of 2,400 F-35 fighter jets on Russian fossil fuels since Vladimir Putin began the invasion. The moral high ground, apparently, runs on gas.

 

Three developments illustrate this strategic void: First, Europe has not produced a single credible peace initiative in a thousand days of bloodshed, while even Trump - hardly a diplomatic virtuoso - pushes for resolution. Second, public patience evaporates as citizens wonder why their skyrocketing heating bills finance a conflict with no visible endpoint. Third, the impossibility of a Ukrainian victory, promoted by the EU leaders as if achievable, reveals a bloc incapable of defining basic terms - no consensus exists on whether territorial integrity or regional stability should take precedence.

 

However reprehensible the invasion and the horrors of war may be, only Trump's return to power has stripped away the emperor's clothes: Europe's Ukraine strategy was never truly its own. It merely followed Joe Biden's lead while maintaining the illusion of an independent security policy.

 

Furthermore, the promise of EU membership for Ukraine is perhaps the cruelest deception in recent international relations. Accession before the 2030s is impossible, yet European leaders persist in the charade, offering hope while knowing full well that enlargement requires unanimous approval at every stage of negotiations - an inconvenient detail they quietly hide while striking poses for the cameras with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in military fashion.

 

4. "We the Greenest": Ideological Zealotry Disguised as Environmental Policy

The Green Agenda metamorphosed during the 2019-2024 term from environmental pragmatism into a quasi-religious cult. The mandate to eliminate combustion engines by 2035 showed the planning acumen of Soviet five-year plans: grand in ambition, disastrous in implementation. The reclassification of nuclear energy as green lacked scientific coherence but filled political necessity - confusing true believers while convincing no skeptics.

 

While Brussels mandated EVs with messianic enthusiasm, it ignored charging infrastructure gaps across the continent, vehicle prices beyond middle-class reach, and the inconvenient fact that Chinese manufacturers are winning the race. Meanwhile, the continent's automotive industry - once Europe's manufacturing pride - faces annihilation with the enthusiastic blessing of its regulators.

 

The panicked imposition of tariffs on Chinese EVs reveals the contradiction at Europe's core: demanding an electric revolution while sabotaging the market forces needed to achieve it. This protectionism masks a deeper failure - the inability to develop an industrial vision beyond regulatory walls and wishful thinking.

 

By cultivating a culture of individual guilt among citizens' plastic straws and polluting weekend drives, rather than addressing the systemic drivers of emissions, the Commission embraced environmental symbolism over substantive reform. This approach has produced predictable results: citizens perceive green policies as punitive edicts from above rather than collective and transformative advancement. Now, faced with backlash and policy fatigue, the Commission has begun to retreat - implicitly admitting its miscalculation.

 

Empty Frenzy

The latest plans presented in 2025 - frantic, flashy, and inadequate - reveal a Commission that seems to believe Europe's future depends on a biblical multiplication of resources it does not have. This performative urgency masks a deeper void: grand visions paraded in place of actual capability.

 

The Commission's agenda, presented as a response to geopolitical determination, China de-risking, and the race for tech leadership, remains a collection of inflated goals disconnected from real instruments. Funding shortfalls and political resistance stall execution. Rather than a reset, the agenda recycles familiar policies. Defense coordination, AI infrastructure, and industrial support suggest motion, but lack scale and are limited by national vetoes and tight fiscal margins.

 

The defense financial architecture confirms it. New funding is marginal. Member states are pressed to commit 650 billion EUR over four years, shielded by a promise that military spending won't breach deficit rules. The remainder is familiar money repurposed: 90 billion EUR from NextGenerationEU, structural funds redirected to defense R&D and mobility, and credit channeled through the European Investment Bank. Visibly, this is less renewal than rebranding.

 

Even earlier frameworks have slipped into irrelevance. The Strategic Compass, launched in 2022 as the EU's roadmap to strengthen security and defense by 2030, has vanished from serious debate - quietly shelved. Meant to confront external threats, the Compass has followed the path of Global Gateway, reduced to a catch-all drawer for initiatives designed more to impress than to deliver. The so-called "achievements" in the March 2024 report reflected administrative churn, not real power consolidation or strategic autonomy. As Beijing expands its global reach and Washington turns inward, the Compass has ceased to function. Its pomposity has dissolved into the usual performative declarations.

 

The latest policies, unveiled with a flourish, follow the same familiar pattern: defense with "ReArm Europe," AI through digital policy, and industry via the Clean Industrial Deal (from "green" to "clean"). Yet each initiative rests on the same void. Plans are rolled out without financing, deadlines, or enforcement. Reality sets the limits: there are no new resources. The agenda moves forward, but on borrowed credibility, relying on loosened fiscal rules while transferring burdens to overstretched national systems that are already under strain.

 

The Solution: Europe's Hope

The leadership deficit reached tragicomic proportions at the 2025 Munich Security Conference. As US Vice President JD Vance delivered a harsh assessment of European irrelevance, the local aristocracy reacted like courtiers confronted with unpleasant truths about their monarch - shocked and indignant, but offering no substantive rebuttal.

 

At a forum meant to address security challenges, European leaders failed to provide a coherent and direct response. Instead, their speech - after Vance left the room - was filled with hollow grandiloquence and inappropriate jokes, more suited to a show than a solemn event. In the end, the European leaders' cowardly silence reinforced Vance's argument far more effectively than his words ever could. Instead, the representatives later took to X, formerly Twitter, to express their outrage.

 

The Munich debacle was a symptom of a deeper malaise - one rooted in Europe's inability to pivot from bureaucratic inertia to bold, strategic reinvention. The EU requires not another rearrangement of Brussels' bureaucratic furniture, but a fundamental transformation of purpose. If Europe's flagship projects have morphed into shipwrecks, the time for navigational change has arrived.

 

Who stands as Europe's potential renaissance leader? A figure who comprehends both financial realities and the architecture of power. Someone different from their contemporaries lost in ideological labyrinths or clinging to a political salary until pension day; somebody who possesses what Brussels desperately lacks: gravitas that commands respect from Beijing to Washington, and technocratic expertise that translates vision into results.

 

A tethered bottle cap pollutes whether attached or separate, just as a constrained Europe remains strategically impotent despite its regulatory sophistication. The choice is straightforward: start again, reappoint leaders, and pursue renewal, or continue the steady march toward becoming history's most exquisitely regulated museum - admired for past glories while the future is decided elsewhere.

 

 

This article is from Vol. 55 issue of TI Observer (TIO), which examines Europe's future amid a turbulent global landscape, offering in-depth perspectives on its current challenges and exploring how Europe can rebuild its security capabilities, regain a competitive edge in science and technological development, and achieve strategic objectives. If you are interested in knowing more about the issue, please click here:

http://en.taiheinstitute.org/UpLoadFile/files/2025/4/30/10458855a69f087c-0.pdf

 

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