-Analysis-
PARIS — Declining power seeks new software to keep pace with history. Despite the few bursts of energy it has shown itself capable of during several recent international crises — COVID and Ukraine, in particular — the European Union seems increasingly ineffectual in the face of a global upheaval whose very principles seem to elude it.
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While the past two decades had seen the country fall behind the United States economically, recovery did not seem totally out of reach. The patient needed the right treatment to get back on its feet, and the latest medical opinion, dubbed the Draghi report, could serve as a roadmap. But with Donald Trump back in the White House, more hostile than ever, only intensive care and real shock treatment could offer a glimmer of hope.
The Brussels mechanism, an impressive precision clockwork for producing decisions for 27, seems increasingly at odds with the codes of the new world order.
If this weren’t the case, the EU would have offered us a very different show in recent weeks than the one of tetany in the face of Trump’s shattering declarations on Greenland, Elon Musk’s unbridled interference in German politics or Mark Zuckerberg’s staggering declarations placing Europe virtually in the same bag as China, among the territories leaning towards censorship.
Like a deer in headlights
Of course, there are circumstantial explanations for this deafening silence. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was ill, and her recent speech in Davos showed a little more fighting spirit, promising “pragmatism” in a world of “ruthless geostrategic rivalries.”
Another issue that Europe could maybe hope to overcome is that there is no leader powerful enough among the major European countries today to embody a voice that carries weight in the face of the new American strongman. We can always hope that this will eventually come to an end.
But for the rest, the problem is ontological. It is the EU’s principles which, more and more, seems to condemn it to incompatibility with the way the world works.
The world’s two leading powers have one thing in common methodologically: opacity.
The list of hiatuses is long. As an association of countries with very different, even opposing, diplomatic cultures, the EU has never had a real geostrategic backbone. At a time when the American umbrella risks being smashed to pieces, this deficiency no longer appears as a secondary problem but as a structural flaw. A peace project built on the values of cooperation and looking to transcend nationalisms, Europe is like a deer in headlights in a geopolitical framework, sliding toward confrontation and bringing identity-based ties back to the fore.
An institutional structure designed to produce consensus, and therefore moderation, it has no magic wand to transform itself into a pugnacious political animal in the great international wrestling match — where power is displayed as much as it’s used. A machine built on a form of co-decision squared, since if has to bring not only member states but also institutions into agreement, it carries the seed of slowness, while the great game of planetary Go calls for fast, strong reactions.
Shared opacity
But with Trump II comes another European gene that geopolitical natural selection might be able to get the better off: the EU’s tendency toward transparency. Whether in terms of leadership style or political tendency, China and the U.S. could not be more opposed. But now, the world’s two leading powers have one thing in common methodologically: opacity.
Whether it’s announcing massive stimulus measures, organizing military maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait or fine-tuning a trade retaliation, the Chinese communist machine is designed to be as illegible as possible. This ambiguity enables China to stay one step ahead of its adversary: While it struggles to decipher what is being played out in Beijing, Chinese strategists keep all their options open until the last moment. This opacity, which is at the heart of Chinese strategic thinking, is now also being seen in Washington.
Poker game
Whether he’s talking about Greenland, the Panama Canal, Canada, tariffs, military support or technological competition, Trump uses a well-known technique: bluffing. Mixing all the parameters of a diplomatic relationship in one big poker game — while the good European student has learned to deal with them separately — he always threatens the worst, without us knowing how far he’s able to go.
China, which has been practicing a strategic grammar based on slyness and concealment for centuries, is in charted territory. The EU, on the other hand, is exposing its fears and differences of analysis in the light of day before debating them in plenary session at the European Parliament.
The enemy only has to pull the most fragile levers to bring out divisions. With the confrontation that is taking place, the democratic virtues of transparency are no longer enough to compensate for the immense fragility it induces. In a world where alliances are variable and cunning prevails, including with the enigmatic Russian President Vladimir Putin, geostrategic urgency makes Europe far too legible to be feared.
