EU needs political adults, not feckless children, in Trump era

When Brussels convinced itself that regulation could substitute for power and values for capacity, leverage migrated elsewhere. Europe rendered its own vulnerabilities exploitable; Washington and Beijing simply did not hesitate to use them.

Sermons multiplied as factories vanished; dependence was a policy choice, defended in public, moralized at home, and institutionalized through repetition until it hardened into reflex.

European leaders luxuriated in talk of principles, moral superiority, a manicured garden threatened by the jungle, normative power, ethical trade, the Brussels Effect and enlightened multilateralism, while neglecting the unglamorous work of building industrial capacity, hard infrastructure, technological depth and military endurance.

Energy, defense, technology, logistics, data, industrial inputs, digital platforms and capital markets were all flagged in advance. Europe refused to accept the cost while the cost still bought clout, choosing to delay until Donald Trump and Xi Jinping made the price punitive.

The dysfunction, therefore, is political. Europe constructed an endless architecture of councils, agencies, strategies, reports and action plans, then used that scaffolding to postpone decisions rather than to enforce it.

Exposure widened in plain sight as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and her teams replaced commitment with communiques, responsibility with ignoble performance and capacity with summit photo-ops. The result is a bloc structurally dependent on two superpowers, the US and China, that is very rich in process but poor in consequences.

Trump has treated this reality with an overdose of testosterone and excitement. He addresses European leaders as a debt collector addresses a serial defaulter who promises reform while missing every deadline. He has ridiculed them openly and repeatedly, mocked their reliance on American protection and their moral lectures delivered without matching force and imposed long-arm jurisdiction without encountering resistance.

“They are weak… They’re not doing a good job,” he said in December, and nothing in Europe’s response contradicted the assessment.

Indeed, two of the most degrading scenes in Atlantic history occurred when Trump seated European leaders behind the Resolute Desk and lectured them like inattentive schoolchildren. The second came when NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte addressed the US president as “daddy,” reducing the dignity of 32 member states to a gesture of submission.

The same official later appeared before the European Parliament to sneer “keep on dreaming” at any suggestion that Europe might defend itself without the US. The episodes stripped away pretense: European representatives pleading for indulgence, mistaking tone for leverage, and advertising dependence as realism.

Even sovereignty is now staged, as the Greenland episode showed. When Europe’s political class and their minions celebrated a supposed victory because Trump softened his demands on the Danish island, even though under a secret understanding with his “kiddy” Rutte that remains undisclosed weeks later, dysfunction is no longer deniable. Outside Brussels, no serious actor credits the retreat to EU resolve and agency, rather than to the US stock markets’ shock.

It was not credibility, unity or certainly not the dispatch of a few dozen soldiers from seven countries for a routine exercise that shifted Washington’s calculus; claiming deterrence without power is delusional and dangerous, because when Trump returns to Greenland, that narrative will disintegrate, having delayed the harder work of building real constraints. Obviously, nobody inside the bubble has yet grasped what is actually happening.

Beijing applies pressure with less noise and more patience. It treats Europe as a customer unwilling to build alternatives and, therefore, condemned to indefinitely postpone autonomy. Access, meetings, selective concessions and symbolic gestures are traded for restraint and silence while structural dependence deepens.

The representatives call this pragmatism, as if relabeling submission could transform it into competence. They defend their choices as unavoidable, as if they were victims of physics rather than authors of policy. They speak about managing dependencies while signing agreements that deepen them.

The parade of European visits to Beijing illustrates what it looks like: proximity to Chinese leadership is treated as an achievement in itself. These trips promise stability, reduced volatility and optionality in an era of American unpredictability, only to conclude as transactions in which symbolism is exchanged for modest trade relief.

The European heads of government return celebrating marginal wins that alter nothing, advertising their fear of exclusion and signing to Beijing that compliance is cheapest when leaders are desperate to be photographed against the backdrop of the Forbidden City.

The British case, with former human rights advocate Starmer visiting Beijing after an eight-year hiatus in Downing Street-level rendezvous, exposes the confusion. Critics who moralize engagement miss the point, defenders who sell it as enlightened realism miss it too.

Engagement is not the issue; the absence of purpose is. China’s scale in innovation, manufacturing, research, and technology makes disengagement costly in fields that matter, from AI to life sciences and climate action. Yet engagement turns into dependency when access to Chinese and American ecosystems replaces the rebuilding of European capability.

Because the underlying contradictions remain unresolved. Europe wants American security guarantees and intelligence infrastructure while resenting American bullying. It wants Chinese markets and industrial inputs while resenting Chinese leverage. It wants to speak the language of sovereignty while outsourcing the instruments that make sovereignty credible.

This is where the current cohort hides behind long-term vulnerabilities to evade accountability. Those vulnerabilities accumulated over decades, but this generation inherited a window in which early action still bought leverage.

In principle, that is the reason to enter politics: to absorb costs on behalf of the public, not to evade them for personal survival. Yet they deliberately decline it, protecting comfort and political careers, deferring adjustment until it hits.

Hence, authority was never the limiting factor; power allows leaders to reorder timing and sequencing, repeal constraints, and establish credibility through timely action. As Max Weber observed, “politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”

So why does Europe’s current class fail to act? Because imposing costs in advance requires confrontation and visible sacrifice, those are consistently traded for plausible deniability and institutional shelter rather than leadership. Basically, Europe’s current class lacks the political capital and stature to impose costs, and has neither the will nor the credibility to build the leverage required to do so.

Behind closed doors, their alibi is always the same: publics do not accept sacrifice. The claim serves as a convenient cover for paralysis. In reality, European societies have absorbed sacrifice when costs were explained promptly, distributed fairly and linked to concrete protection. What is absent is leadership willing to speak without anesthesia and act before a crisis eliminates choice.

The result is coalition weakness by design. Each capital pursues short-term relief, labels it national interest, then expresses shock when collective leverage dissolves. One state trades symbolic concessions for market access, another seeks exemptions from controls, a third demands American protection, and the next courts Chinese capital. Predictably, Europe cannot act as a unit under pressure because it refuses to bear the burden collectively in advance.

Worse, the way Europe handles these issues diffuses responsibility and shields decision-makers from consequence. Exposure is sectoral and concrete, concentrated in specific technologies, raw materials, infrastructure nodes, and chokepoints. A serious politics would rank dependencies by risk, decide which are intolerable, which can be managed, what redundancy costs, and who pays.

Correction starts by abandoning slogans and restoring slack where pressure is applied. Optionality means absorbing coercion without capitulation, built through shared capacity and collective mechanisms that raise the price of pressure. That requires accepting friction early and fixing trade-offs in advance rather than improvising under duress.

Second, every major decision in trade, investment, technology, and infrastructure must then pass a coercion test. If a tie creates leverage that can be weaponized, it must be reduced or ring-fenced with enforcement that survives electoral cycles and new weak leaders.

Third, industrial policy must drop any pretense of elegance. Europe does not need to rebuild everything, but it must secure the nodes that decide endurance: advanced manufacturing, dual-use production, and procurement systems that function and create EU champions. Given that modern conflict is industrial and technological, deterrence rests on production depth and logistical reliability.

Fourth, leadership renewal is unavoidable. The current class governs as caretakers in a period that punishes caretakers, with incentives that reward caution rather than consequences. Europe needs leaders willing to spend political capital, absorb hostility from protected interests, and secure cross-party commitments that make reversal politically costly. This is not a call for saviors. It is a demand for adults.

As long as extraction remains cheap, Washington will extract. As long as leverage remains effective, Beijing will apply it. Europe can change this only by making coercion expensive and delay politically costly. Otherwise, it will keep paying to delay decisions until the option to postpone is no longer available for purchase.

The current generation has completed the training phase. The lesson has been taught publicly, repeatedly and humiliatingly. Europe will either build the capacity that makes pressure fail or remain a market to be milked and a security client to be billed, reciting sovereignty while signing away the means to defend it.

Sebastian Contin Trillo-Figueroa is a Hong Kong-based geopolitics strategist with a focus on Europe-Asia relations.