There is no single European foreign policy in the way there is a Chinese or American one — the EU is 27 states with 27 histories, and the UK has left the room. But since 2022 a common frame has emerged, forced into being by the war in Ukraine, the Trump II presidency and the intensifying US–China rivalry. Europe finds itself structurally dependent on three outside powers: the United States for security, China for trade and industrial inputs, Russia (until recently) for energy. Every strategic conversation in Brussels, Berlin and Paris now revolves around a single question: how does Europe reduce these dependencies fast enough to remain a rule-setter rather than a rule-taker in the world its allies and rivals are now openly reshaping?
'Strategic autonomy' was a French concept — Macron's phrase, initially — that most Europeans found abstract or annoying until Trump I, Brexit and Covid made it concrete. It means the capacity to act, defend and produce without needing permission or supply from Washington or Beijing. In practice it has four fronts: defence (a European pillar of NATO plus indigenous capabilities), industry (chips, batteries, pharmaceuticals, critical minerals), technology (cloud, AI, quantum, biotech), and finance (a euro that can settle strategic trade without the dollar system). Progress has been real but uneven: the European Chips Act, the Critical Raw Materials Act, PESCO, the European Defence Fund. It has also been slow — measured in the years and hundreds of billions of euros needed, while the world moves in months.
Since 1949 European security has rested on Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, backed in practice by around 100,000 US troops permanently stationed on the continent, the US nuclear umbrella, and American command of the intelligence, logistics and enabling assets that make NATO function. Every European defence plan has been built on the assumption that this umbrella holds. Trump II has forced Europeans to price, for the first time in three generations, what happens if it does not. Estimates for a fully European defence posture — one that could deter Russia without American help — run to 3-4% of GDP sustained for a decade, plus the reconstitution of nuclear deterrence beyond France's arsenal and the UK's Trident. The numbers are affordable; the political will and the industrial base to execute in time are the harder questions.
The 2022 invasion of Ukraine ended a 30-year European experiment with 'change through trade' — the German-led belief that economic interdependence would liberalise and pacify Russia. Nord Stream is silent. Finland and Sweden are in NATO. Poland is building the largest land army in Europe. Germany has committed to a €100bn Sondervermögen for defence. The eastern EU states — from Estonia to Bulgaria — are treated seriously in a way they were not before. Whatever the outcome in Ukraine, the European consensus is now that Russia will remain a hostile revisionist power on the eastern frontier for the foreseeable future, and that the continent must be able to deter it independently of American choices.
The EU's official 2019 formulation — China is simultaneously a 'partner, competitor and systemic rival' — captures the impossible balancing act Brussels is trying to run. China is the EU's second-largest trading partner. German automakers, Dutch semiconductor equipment (ASML), French luxury and aerospace, Italian mid-caps: all depend on Chinese demand and Chinese supply chains. At the same time China's electric vehicles are eating European car market share, Chinese state subsidies are distorting solar and battery markets, and pressure from Washington to align on export controls is intensifying. 'De-risking, not decoupling' — Ursula von der Leyen's phrase — is the current compromise. Whether it holds if Beijing arms Russia or moves on Taiwan is the open question.
In 2021 Russia supplied roughly 40% of European gas and a quarter of its oil. Two years later pipeline gas imports had collapsed by more than 80%, replaced by American and Qatari LNG, Norwegian pipelines, faster renewable build-out, and — controversially — the reopening of coal plants and delayed nuclear closures. The transition worked, at real cost: European gas prices spiked to 10x historical norms, industrial energy-intensive users (chemicals, steel, aluminium) permanently lost production, and consumer bills required hundreds of billions in state support. The long-term direction is clear: massive renewable build-out, French and Eastern European nuclear, hydrogen infrastructure, LNG import terminals as a permanent feature. Energy sovereignty is now treated as national security in every European capital.
Europe's southern border runs along the Mediterranean and through the Sahel — a zone of state failure, climate stress, and demographic pressure that produces migration flows Europe has been unable to manage politically for a decade. The 2015 Syrian refugee crisis fractured European solidarity and midwifed populist parties from Italy to Sweden. Every year since, tens to hundreds of thousands cross from Libya, Tunisia, and Turkey. The EU's response has been a mix of deals with autocratic transit states (Turkey 2016, Tunisia 2023, Libya opaquely), border externalisation, and Frontex enlargement. From Brussels' map, the collapse of the Sahel states, the return of Russian and Chinese influence in Africa, and climate-driven displacement all converge on the same southern flank. Migration policy is now inseparable from Africa policy and from domestic politics in a way it was not before 2015.
For decades EU enlargement was treated as a technical process — candidate countries met acquis chapters, joined the club. The war in Ukraine turned it geopolitical overnight. Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia are candidates; the Western Balkans (dormant since 2013) is back on the agenda; Turkey's accession is dead but its association matters. The strategic argument is now dominant: an EU that does not integrate its eastern and south-eastern periphery leaves a vacuum that Russia, China and Turkey will fill. The internal argument — that a 35-member Union with today's decision rules would be paralysed — is why enlargement is now bundled with treaty reform (qualified majority voting on foreign policy, new budget rules). Whether Europe can do both simultaneously is one of the defining questions of the decade.
Europe's strategic position is uncomfortable and — for the first time in living memory — genuinely at stake. Dependent on an American ally whose commitment is now conditional, exposed to a Russian neighbour that is openly revisionist, integrated with a Chinese trading partner that is simultaneously a systemic rival, and pressured from the south by state failure and migration. The response — strategic autonomy, defence rebuilding, energy independence, enlargement, industrial policy — is coherent on paper but slow in execution, and the world is not waiting. Whether Europe emerges from this decade as a genuine pole in a multipolar order, or as a wealthy but strategically irrelevant peninsula of Eurasia, depends on decisions being made now in Berlin, Paris, Warsaw and Brussels — and on whether those capitals can act together fast enough.