Europe’s squeezed between China and the United States
Forget the ‘often-floated idea of a G2,’ there needs to be talk of a G3 that includes Europe
Europe and the EU should be a geopolitical force to be reckoned with. In 2024, the European Union was the second-largest economy in the world after the United States and before China. There is also nothing comparable to the trading links between these three players.
Last year, bilateral trade in goods between the US and China was US$414 billion. In comparison, the EU and the US constituted a staggering third of global trade. Between them, it came in at €1.77 trillion, or $466.2 billion, in 2025.
These figures show that, far from the floated idea of a “Group of Two” or G2, where Beijing and Washington act as the joint steering committee for the planet, there needs to be talk of a G3 that includes Europe. These three powers tend to silo and segregate their relations.
Yet it almost always comes at the expense of Europe. This is a phenomenon that has intensified under American President Donald Trump. When the US and China meet, the Europeans tend to be outside the room with everyone else, trying to listen in.
Starmer criticised
There is dialogue between Beijing and Brussels. There was even, briefly under President Joe Biden, an EU-US dialogue to coordinate their approach to China and the Indo-Pacific. This was mothballed when Trump returned to office last year.
But what there has never been is a proper high-level Europe, China and US trilateral summit. And that situation is unlikely to change. When British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited China in January, Trump criticised the trip.
He said it was “very dangerous” for the United Kingdom to do business with Beijing.
Despite this, when Trump himself visited China in May, the sizeable technology delegation that accompanied him and the agreement for Beijing to buy 200 Boeing aircraft showed dealmaking was absolutely fine for the US.
The mindset is clear enough. China and the US as superpowers have the right to deal with each other however they feel fit. No one else gets a look in. Europe’s default position has been to accept this situation and sit between its two most important relationships.
This has been demonstrated by the EU’s various high-level iterations of a policy approach towards China in the past 15 years. The most recent, in 2019, ended up balancing China between collaborator, adversary and competitor, illustrating Europe’s indecisive mindset.
In terms of collaboration, Europe’s most obvious area of engagement with China has been in trade and investment. There has been technology transfer in automotives and manufacturing, and acceptance of Chinese tech company Huawei in European telecoms systems.
But here, too, Europe has been cautious, with Huawei’s access to European markets heavily restricted from 2020 after American pressure.
Defense spending
The ways in which Trump has turned on his friends – demanding control of Greenland early this year and criticizing Nato and defense spending levels by longstanding allies – has created solid grounds for a European rethink.
Europe needs to acknowledge that working out its policy on China means producing not just detailed plans – it is pretty good at that – but politically committed ones that place its own interests first. Brussels and other European capitals are dealing with a harsh emerging reality.
Their key security relationship with the US is undergoing profound change and China is becoming a totally different kind of potential partner as it emerges as an innovator and a technology and research powerhouse.
Both phenomenon change the fundamental paradigm in which the EU now sits, and call for a different policy response – one that recognizes more overtly that, for many areas and for many reasons, China is a partner and not a straightforward, unambiguous threat.
If we look at vastly consequential global issues, we can see this clearly. Europe is more aligned with China than the US on the threat of global warming from human activity and the need to use alternatives to fossil fuels.
Beijing and Brussels are also on the same page about the benefits and threats from AI, where China is now overtly stipulating the need to manage the effects of this new technology on jobs. And China, like Europe, views Trump’s attack on Iran with misgivings.
At the same time, Europe also worries about the depth of Trump’s commitments – not just to NATO, where his skepticism is well established, but in terms of standing by Taiwan were it ever to be attacked. Realignment will not happen overnight, nor is there an easy destination.
Trump’s White House successor, for example, may well be more into multilateralism. Even the current administration is talking about expanding its nuclear commitments in Europe. But the central reality is clear enough.
Passive posture
At a fifth of global GDP, and with a population of almost half a billion, Europe cannot continue to have a deferential, largely passive posture. And certainly not one where its largest and second-largest economic partners, the US and China, are involved.
At the very least, next time these two superpowers sneak into a room to continue their conversations, Europe should work out good arguments to join them, and not sit outside anxiously eavesdropping alongside everyone else.
Kerry Brown is a Professor of Chinese Politics and the Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of China Factor.