Most of the European defence and foreign policy elites meeting at the Munich Security Conference agree that the United States has taken a wrecking ball to the old “rules-based, international order”.
But they have yet to work out just what Europe ought to do about it and its implications, in particular, for relations with China.
In their annual report in advance of the conference, its organisers said that political forces favouring destruction over reform were gaining momentum in many western societies.
Domestically and internationally, political structures were now perceived as overly bureaucratised, judicialised and impossible to reform.
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“The result is a new climate in which those who employ bulldozers, wrecking balls, and chainsaws are often cautiously admired if not openly celebrated. The most powerful of those who take the axe to existing rules and institutions is US president Donald Trump,” the report says.
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney sounded the alarm at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month after Trump repeated his demand that Denmark should cede Greenland to the US.
Carney’s call for middle powers to work together in flexible alliances resonated with European leaders who had already concluded that Washington was no longer a reliable security partner.
Europe’s sense of alienation from the US appears to have deepened since Carney’s speech as Washington has threatened to impose fresh trade tariffs despite last year’s trading agreement with the European Union.
And as European leaders remain shut out of US-led talks to end Russia’s war on Ukraine, they have little reason to believe that Europe’s interests will be reflected in any settlement that comes out of those negotiations.
Finnish president Alexander Stubb, who has the closest relationship with Trump of any European leader, summed up the predicament in blunt terms to his country’s parliament last week. “The foreign policy of the current US administration is based on an ideology that contradicts our own values,” he said.
Since the end of the Cold War, the western alliance has been held together by a sense of shared values as much as interests, which often diverged.
It was in the name of these values – individual freedom, democracy and the rule of law – that western coalitions intervened in former Yugoslavia in 1999 and in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Disagreements over the disastrous US-led war in Iraq were not enough to undermine the sense of shared values and some European allies were happy to help Washington as it promoted democracy in the Middle East through torture, kidnapping and targeted assassinations.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was the last time the western partners united around shared values to help with an armed conflict as they came to Kyiv’s assistance. Moscow’s aggression was in clear breach of international law.
Washington also invoked shared values in recent years to recruit Europe into its campaign to limit China’s access to some advanced technology and to exclude Chinese firms from providing sensitive infrastructure in western countries.
This has seen European governments introduce economic barriers with China that go beyond the rational deployment of restrictive measures in pursuit of a more balanced trade relationship.
The parade of European leaders visiting Beijing already this year, starting with Taoiseach Micheál Martin last month, is a sign of the rethink under way across the Continent about relations with China.
At the same time, Beijing is presenting itself as a reliable partner that remains committed to multilateral institutions such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Trade Organisation, in contrast to the US.
Economically, China represents both a threat and an opportunity for the EU. Although the trade relationship is unbalanced and complicated, Beijing and Brussels have the negotiating expertise and capacity to improve it. Both the EU and China share an interest in maintaining a multilateral, rules-based trading system where disputes can be effectively adjudicated and resolved.
Brussels and Beijing can also work together on climate change, global health and other international issues that the Trump administration has turned its back on. The two sides are also closer to one another in their approach to regulating online spaces and artificial intelligence than either are to Washington.
The question that troubles European governments is whether it is possible to pursue a closer relationship with China and form alliances with Beijing on some issues while remaining true to their values.
China is a party state where the Communist Party controls all the levers of power, including the police, the military and the legal system. Media are censored and access to some internet sites is banned. But, unlike the Soviet Union and the US during the Cold War, Beijing has no interest in exporting its model and is content to operate within the existing international system, even if it wants to change it.
Xi Jinping has launched global initiatives on development, security, civilisations and governance, and China uses its economic weight to pursue its diplomatic interests. But it is indifferent to the internal governance systems of other countries and values close relationships with the most liberal democracies as much as with dictatorships such as North Korea or Saudi Arabia.
The most neuralgic issue for Beijing is Taiwan, which it views as an internal matter, and it often reacts intemperately to what it perceives as foreign interference in the affairs of the self-governing island. All EU member-states favour maintaining the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and careful diplomacy can usually prevent blow-ups from Beijing without offering a green light for any action to reclaim the island by force.
The 20-year jail sentence handed down in Hong Kong this week to the 78-year-old former media owner Jimmy Lai prompted a statement from the EU’s External Action Service deploring it and calling for his release. As UN human rights chief Volker Türk pointed out, the case against Lai and the cruelty of the sentence highlighted how vague and overly broad the provisions of Hong Kong’s national security law were.
The EU’s response to Lai’s sentencing was muted, with no threat of sanctions similar to those imposed on Chinese officials in protest against the treatment of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang province. But it was a lot more emphatic than its response to the killing of civilians in Minneapolis by US federal agents, which has elicited no official EU protest at all.
