The European Union (EU), along with the other major countries in Europe, should be a geopolitical force to be reckoned with. In 2024, the EU was the second-largest economy in the world after the US and before China.
There is also nothing comparable to the trading links between these three players. In 2025, bilateral trade in goods between the US and China was US$414 billion (£307 billion). The EU and US, meanwhile, constitute a staggering third of global trade – with trade between them coming in at €1.77 trillion (£1.53 trillion) that same year.
These figures show that, far from the often-floated idea of a “Group of Two” (G2) where the US and China act as the joint steering committee for the planet, there really needs to be talk of a G3 that includes Europe.
My research has dealt with the relationship between China, Europe and the US for over 30 years. These three powers tend to silo and segregate their relations, which almost always comes at the expense of Europe. This is a phenomenon that has intensified under the US president, Donald Trump, in his two terms in office.
When the US and China meet, the Europeans tend to be outside the room with everyone else, trying to listen in. There is dialogue between China and the EU. 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 in 2025.
However, what there has never been is a proper high-level Europe, China and US trilateral summit. And that situation is unlikely to change. When the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, visited China in January 2026, Trump criticised the trip. He said it was “very dangerous” for the UK 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, trying to balance. This has been demonstrated by the EU’s various high-level iterations of a policy approach towards China over the past 15 years. The most recent, in 2019, ended up balancing China between collaborator, adversary and competitor – illustrating Europe’s ruminative and indecisive mindset.
In terms of collaboration, Europe’s most obvious area of recent 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.
The ways in which Trump has turned on his friends – demanding control of Greenland early in 2026 and criticising Nato and defence spending levels by longstanding allies – has created solid grounds for a rethink. Europe needs to acknowledge that working out its own policy on China means producing not just detailed plans (Europe is pretty good at that), but politically committed ones that place its own interests first.
Europe’s 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 recognises 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 real depth of Trump’s commitments – not just to Nato where his scepticism 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.
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.
