Subject: Europe can only play for time
And this is from a European paper!

https://brusselssignal.eu/2025...

EU is no match for China or US, Europe can only play for time

In hindsight, what makes the 1990s appear to be worthy of nostalgia is the fact that almost everything ran on autopilot. European integration hummed along with Austria, Sweden, and Finland joining the European Union in 1995, turning a club of 12 into a club of 15. The former countries of the Warsaw Pact were cleaning up what remained of their communist legacy and embarked on a period of economic growth, refuting all the nay-sayers who claimed that it would take decades for Poland, Hungary, et al. to successfully evolve into capitalist-democratic systems. ... German engineering, Finnish cell phones (Nokia), French Art, Austrian Energy Drinks (Red Bull) – only doom-mongers would claim that the EU was on a path of decline.

The dominant ideology of the time was embodied by the Washington Consensus and neoclassical economics, with the latter being the academic justification of the former: All that was needed for peace and prosperity were open markets and capital inflows, with everything else taking care of itself.

Hmm. In addition to outsourcing all of their national defense to America:

There were, of course, some signs that thunderclouds have already been gathering as soon as the mid-1990s. European right-wing parties like the Austrian Freedom Party rose in prominence due to their worries about mass migration, and US presidential candidate Pat Buchanan warned that trade deals with China will hurt American workers.

*Paging Jedi on Pat B* :)

And here's the crux:
While polemics are funny – which is why I engage in them regularly myself – they cannot replace the reality of uneven power distributions in the world. The European model of being protected by the US, produce in China, and get petroleum from Russia has reached its sell-by date.

In other words, the Euros need to discover the magical world of self-reliance, and pretty damn quick.

Brussels is sitting at a chess table and forgot how to play: the empty talk about strategic autonomy is laughable coming from a continent that has neither military, economic nor energy autonomy.

A-yup. When you don't make the basics, you're dependent on those that do. It's that simple.