Six months into President Donald Trump’s second term, European leaders find themselves in a vulnerable geopolitical position. Although U.S. support for Ukraine has moved in a more positive direction for now, trade negotiations following the “Liberation Day” tariffs with the United States continue to drag on past the initial deadline of July 9, and Trump has mused publicly about setting tariffs on the European Union as high as 30 percent.
European leaders are well aware that the view of Europe inside Trump’s court is dim. As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth texted Vice President J.D. Vance in the “Signalgate” group chat: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”
With no U.S. trade deal in hand, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa traveled to Beijing this week for their much-anticipated China summit on July 24 without many cards to play. The atmosphere ahead of the meeting, which marked the 50th anniversary of EU-China ties, was remarkably negative on both sides, though the tone of the meetings themselves was more diplomatic. In my recent conversations with senior European diplomats, it was clear that they didn’t expect deliverables or major developments, beyond broad pledges in a joint statement on climate change and discussion of critical minerals supplies; this was meeting for meeting’s sake.
Europe’s squeezed position is not surprising, but what it reveals about China’s current geopolitical strategy is. Many commentators in the United States, Europe, and Asia had predicted that China would take advantage of Trump’s return to engage in a “charm offensive,” offering inducements to U.S. allies to peel them away from a unilateralist United States. But to date Beijing has not engaged in a meaningful and sustained charm offensive, but instead insisted that European countries make unilateral concessions and “earn” what Beijing sees as the privilege of improved ties.
Some voices in China argued for a different approach. Leading Chinese strategists publicly urged China’s leaders, in the words of the influential scholar Yan Xuetong, to prepare for “Trump’s dubious commitment to U.S. allies [to] encourage other countries to hedge their bets, building ties with Beijing to offset the unpredictability of Washington.” Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, argued that Trump’s approach of aggressively alienating U.S. allies provided “a chance for China’s diplomacy” with those countries: “I think we should grasp the chance.”
But rather than woo Europe, China is turning the screws. Public reporting and private conversations both make clear that Beijing offered far fewer inducements or constructive negotiating proposals ahead of the summit than many European officials had expected. China lifted sanctions on some European parliamentarians, but in the most strategically significant areas—which include China’s support for Russia, its export control licensing regime for critical minerals and rare earth magnets, and its massive industrial overcapacity—China has done little to assuage European concerns.
President Xi Jinping’s close partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin continues unabated, posing a significant and ongoing threat to European security. China’s critical minerals export controls weaponized a chokepoint that threatens key European industries, a major supply chain vulnerability that persists even if some licenses are currently being granted. And China’s soaring exports of manufactured goods—what Sander Tordoir and Brad Setser have called a “second China shock”—are flooding the global market at the expense of major European exporters like Germany, as well as the United States and Japan.
Earlier in the year, von der Leyen mused about “expand[ing] our trade and investment ties” with China, but more recently, she said at a meeting of the G-7, “[I]nstead of restricting exports, [China] flooded global markets with cheap rare earths to wipe out competitors. Western mines and processors closed, leaving China to dominate. This pattern of dominance, dependency, and blackmail continues today.”
China’s strategic goals are for Europe to assert greater independence from the United States, undermining Washington’s ability to partner with its allies to compete with China, and for the continent, as a significant market and source of advanced technology, to develop greater dependence on China, boosting its growth. China also wants the EU to lift tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and roll back other restrictions. But to date it has pursued these goals mostly with rhetoric rather than incentives. Beijing has done little to improve ties on terms that would be acceptable to European leaders.
China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, has toured Europe several times since Trump’s inauguration, and China’s envoy for European affairs, Lu Shaye, has criticized the Trump administration’s policies toward Europe as “brazen and domineering,” explicitly telling Europeans to shift toward China as a result: “I believe European friends should reflect on this and compare the Trump administration’s policies with those of the Chinese government.”
But when European officials make such a comparison, their takeaway has not been to go all in on China. Rather, they are hemmed in between two coercive superpowers and trying to de-risk from both. “If we ever needed a business case for de-risking, China is giving it to us right now,” said senior EU trade official Eva Valle Lagares earlier this summer. And German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, soon after being elected, said his goal would be to “really achieve independence from the USA.”
China’s assessment of European power is the most important factor shaping its current diplomatic approach. The Trump administration’s recent concessions in the U.S.-China trade standoff have confirmed China’s confidence in a hard-edged strategy of pressure and economic coercion—toward Europe as well as the United States and its other allies. That dynamic comes on top of years of mistrust and tit-for-tat exchanges with both the United States and Europe. More fundamentally, despite Xi Jinping’s comment to von der Leyen and Costa that China and Europe are “big guys in the international community,” Beijing seems to believe that Europe has less geopolitical value to China than it once did.
The reality is that both China under Xi and the United States under Trump see Europe as lacking leverage. Responding to von der Leyen’s criticisms at the G-7, China’s Ministry of Commerce said, “The real problem is not China’s excess capacity, but perhaps the EU’s deep anxiety caused by years of insufficient R&D investment and declining industrial competitiveness.”
This week’s summit is crystallizing the belief in European capitals that China cannot be relied on as a hedge against Trump. Only strengthening Europe’s own autonomous capabilities—in both economic and security domains—can let it carve a path of its own, while addressing risks posed by both Trump’s America and Xi’s China.
Of course, an even better path would be to deepen coordination with the United States on challenges posed by China, collaborating to increase pressure on China’s relationship with Russia, restore deterrence around Beijing’s use of its critical minerals export controls, and build a 21st-century industrial base. But the Trump administration is plainly uninterested in working with allies in this way.
To some American strategists, China’s current approach to Europe might seem to be a sign that Trump’s handling of China and Europe is working—and that Beijing is not benefiting significantly from the rupture in trans-Atlantic relations. That is a misreading.
In fact, Beijing’s assessment is that the United States is dismantling the sources of its strength—its global network of alliances and partnerships, including with Europe; its science and technology research ecosystem at its universities; and arms of U.S. influence around the world like the U.S. Agency for International Development and Voice of America—and, from Beijing’s perspective, as many Chinese commentators have suggested, this is a moment when it believes it can let that self-sabotage play out.
China remains especially diplomatically active in neighboring Southeast Asia and parts of the global south and will continue to take advantage of opportunities presented by the Trump administration. But rather than needing to launch a new systematic global bid for leadership, it feels that position is currently being handed to it. So the United States should take no comfort from the lack of a Chinese charm offensive, because what it reveals is something much deeper: Beijing’s profound confidence that it can exploit this era of mercenary multipolarity to its enduring advantage, at the cost of both European and American interests.