The European Union has a choice to make: It can either continue to be China’s de facto ally or show genuine strategic autonomy by confronting President Xi Jinping’s cynical exploitation. 

The urgency of this choice was made clear by a meeting last week between China’s foreign policy chief, Wang Yi, and his EU counterpart, Kaja Kallas. A former prime minister of Estonia, Kallas is a courageous politician who says it like it is. That is a stark contrast to her predecessor, Josep Borrell, who was a bumbling appeaser constantly played for a fool by China, Iran, and Russia. Still, Kallas and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen must galvanize their political union’s improved response to China’s bullying.

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As reported by the South China Morning Post last Friday, Yi told Kallas that China “did not want to see a Russian loss in Ukraine because it feared the United States would then shift its whole focus to Beijing.” Embracing the favored Russian government tactic of playing the victim to undermine its diplomatic interlocutors, Wang is also said to have given Kallas “several ‘history lessons and lectures.'” Their meeting precedes a summit with the EU in China later this month.

Wang’s comments make clear a critical truth that the EU should have recognized years ago and must act on now. Namely, China seeks victory for the aggressor in the bloodiest, most destabilizing war on the European continent since World War II. This conclusion is made only more clear by recent revelations that China has become a major supplier of weapons for Russia’s war against Ukraine. That the Chinese Communist Party takes this position provides an understanding of its absurd claim that it wants “win-win cooperation” with the world. It does not, and it is also arrogant about what it is truly striking, which is domination achieved by whatever evil and diplomatic duplicity is required. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson had the temerity on Monday to lecture the EU that “it is also important to properly handle disagreements and differences by respecting each other and treating the issues constructively.”

How can any serious EU politician look at China’s confirmed support for Russia in its imperial war in Ukraine and believe China is serious about “respecting each other and treating issues constructively?”

The EU must now face up to the truth that China is an adversary, the enemy of all that the EU supposedly prizes: mutual respect and a just international order centered on peaceful cooperation.

China supports the mayhem that Russia has wrought on Europe not because it has an interest in Russia’s imperial ambitions per se, but because the mayhem serves China’s narrow interest in buying space and time to dominate the Pacific. Space and time also to seize Taiwan and dislodge the U.S. as the world’s leading power. China believes it can bully the EU into tolerating its duplicity because of the size of its economy. The EU has given Beijing no reason to believe otherwise.

Whenever the EU pushes back even a little against China, Beijing demonstrates that it thinks it can out-escalate its key trade partner. Responding to the tentative EU tariff against its dumping of electric vehicles into Europe, for example, China introduced tariffs on European exports and banned certain purchases of European medical equipment. The EU hasn’t responded with courage.

The EU should dig deep to recover its moral and political resolve. It’s true that President Donald Trump’s tariffs against the EU don’t help trans-Atlantic alignment against China. But China’s economy is riven with debt, wasteful allocations of capital, a housing market in crisis, feeble consumer spending, and a demographic crisis. This means China is not all-powerful and that the EU can act assertively.

The EU’s better leaders should move against Germany’s greedy pursuit of car exports, French President Emmanuel Macron’s begging to Xi, and Spain and Hungary prostituting themselves to the CCP. Finding some righteous anger, matching it to EU populism, and turning it into a political strategy could force China to take a different approach.

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For example, faced with widespread tariffs against all of its major export markets in Europe, Xi would quickly pressure Putin to end his war in the European east. Faced with a catastrophic threat to export-reliant domestic jobs in China, Xi would make concessions to EU business interests.

The EU needs to decide what it stands for. Is it so enfeebled that it will tolerate even the CCP’s support of a terrible European war?