Which begs the question, why should the EU see China as an adversary? That's mostly an American thing, the Pacific doesn't really concern us.
Maybe alliances will reshuffle in the future?
No rising Chinese middle class without the world's largest wealthy consumer market.
A match made in heaven ;)
From the fall of the Berlin wall until the Ukraine invasion, the US saw Russia as more of an adversary than Europe saw Russia.
Yes, even after Russia annexed Crimea. In fact, it's only this year that Europe has started to significantly increase defense spending, three years after Russia invaded Ukraine. And, even then the most aggressive increase plans end up short of where spending was during the Cold War.
Every US president after Clinton (and maybe Clinton as well) urged European countries, especially NATO ones, to keep funding defense and they cut instead.
It turns out that the cowboys were right, that there was a bear in the woods, and that "soft power" wasn't power.
Or the EU relying on the US army for defense ;)
We're not in the post ww2 world illusion or world peace through commerce, mutual dependencies clearly don't stop nationalist interests. Trump shattered the illusion with his illegal meme tier tariffs, now we're slowly going back to empires dealing with their friends while fucking over anyone else.
Coincidentally it's also why the US and EU are growing further apart.
The US has nothing to offer Europe except LNG that Europe cannot produce itself, or obtain from China at better price or quality. Canada has ~200 years of LNG reserves and can ship to Europe from LNG Canada.
https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/imports/united-s...
https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...
The True Cost of China's Falling Prices - >>45876691 - November 2025
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/americas-self-d...
> In 1995, China accounted for less than five percent of global manufacturing output. By 2010, that number had jumped to around a quarter, and today it stands at nearly a third.
Authoritarian regimes will inevitably attempt to expand because authoritarian leaders view the existence of people they don't rule as a threat towards their rule and they inevitably desire to grow their control and power over more and more people.
Which is ironic that most of the annexation talk came from the US in the recent times, not from China. Canada, Greenland, Panama Canal, Mexico what else has he threatened to annex?
From where I’m sitting in the EU, both seem successful in their quests.
(So I’m assuming they mean China.)
But I don't think that this makes EU policy necessarily incorrect: Would German military spending of 5% GDP have prevented the Crimea annexation?
We won't know, but I don't think so, and European militarism in the 2000s might have led to significantly worse outcomes than we actually got.
I also think that painting this as a clear "US stance proven right in hindsight" is an outsized claim; EU military spending only really came up under Trump, and was a very minor topic before. You could make a similar argument that "the cowboys" were all wrong with the whole middle-east interventionism thing (in Afghanistan and Iraq), but the military side of that was at least competently executed (unlike Russia in Ukraine), collateral damage lower and war crimes somewhat minimized/prosecuted.
I sadly agree that Costa-Rica-style pacifism appears a non-viable approach for the EU now despite looking somewhat workable 15 years ago.
The US is still a very large and attractive market for European exporters, and it would at the very least substantially least hurt Europeans if they had to fully substitute the US with China as a trade partner.
To your point about the US market, I would put forth the size of China, India, and Africa as import markets for Europe. The population of the US is ~343M, ~745M is Europe, while that of China, India, and Africa combined is ~4.6B (as of this comment, rough proxy for total addressable markets). Admittedly the latter are at various stages of development, but I am of a strong opinion they can replace the US considering demographics, proximity, rate of development and purchasing power increasing, etc. International equities have already outperformed the S&P500 this year, so this may happen faster than we might expect. China is not as quite as wealthy as the US, but India and Africa are the last of global emerging markets and where the economic growth future of the world is. Do you configure and target your export economy for growing markets? Or declining markets?
Citations:
https://bsky.app/profile/carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3m... | https://archive.today/P2HxS ("International stocks are outperforming the S&P 500 by the widest margin in 16 years.") - November 12th, 2025
Goldman Strategists See US Stocks Lagging All Peers Next Decade - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-12/goldman-s... | https://archive.today/aINUx - November 12th, 2025
That is not a given, as there are many authoritarian political parties in European countries growing in size and influence. Possibly Europe is only the usual decade or two behind the US developments? Well, I at least hope it does not come to this.
This line here makes it clear to me you've never really researched any of this. Canada doesn't have the ability to export that to anywhere but the USA and refuses to even consider building another pipeline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNG_Canada
https://www.gem.wiki/LNG_Canada_Terminal
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/facilities-we-reg...
https://www.politico.eu/article/canada-lng-europe-tim-hodgso...
(commodity market participant)
Probably not Crimea, but you'd think that the annexation would have caused some rethinking of "soft power".
The lack of European defense spending since 95 means that Europe doesn't have much to help Ukraine. (EU countries brag about "100% to Ukraine" but never talk about how little that 100% is.) It also means that Europe doesn't have much in the way of a defense industry. (And then they whine when money gets spent on US weapons.)
Getting serious in 2014 (after Crimea) would have given Europe options.
> EU military spending only really came up under Trump
Trump's comments, the actual words, on EU defense spending were basically the same as Obama and W's.
The difference was in how Europeans, especially the Germans, reacted.
BTW - do Europeans know how "But we have better work/life balance" comes across? The reaction by many Americans is "Why am I paying to defend their work/life balance?"
Realistically, what options? The only thing that could have really helped in my view in hindsight was either massive visible arms-deliveries to the Ukraine before 2022 (to discourage Russia), or to demonstrate willingness to join the fight (with soldiers). That willingness is and was not there (in neither US/EU), and spending more would not really have helped that.
> you'd think that the annexation would have caused some rethinking of "soft power".
You mean giving up on Russian gas early? It's a much harder call without hindsight in my view if Crimea is the main focus. The whole second Chechen war was much more problematic than that annexation in my view, and if you're not drawing the line for that, than why'd you change your opinion for Crimea?`
I do fully agree with you though that there should have been harsher consequences after 2014, and that those might have actually helped more than anything else (by making the "happy path" for the 2022 invasion worse): I think Putin considered the 2022 invasion as "quick regime change, some yapping from the west and then business as usual in a few years"; the west/EU demonstrating willingness for self-sacrifical sanctions to punish expansionism in 2014 might have discouraged this strongly.
> BTW - do Europeans know how "But we have better work/life balance" comes across? The reaction by many Americans is "Why am I paying to defend their work/life balance?"
I'll give you my European perspective:
1) Yes the US is overspending on its military, but that is entirely their own decision
2) American military spending profits itself first and foremost, because spending mainly goes to domestic industry, and forces are mainly used to further domestic interests
3) Europe is already paying for the humanitarian fallout of ill-advised US interventionism in the middle east, and indirect costs from this alone are in the "percent GDP" range as well
Don't get me wrong, I think it is a really good thing that the US did provide substantial aid during the Ukraine invasion. I personally wish that "the west" did even more, but the sad reality is that a good part of the population considers the Ukraine conflict a "not my problem", and is simply unwilling to pay more to defend human rights abroad (and the attitude is very similar between especially western Europeans and US-americans in my view).
How the Rest of the World Is Moving on From Trump’s ‘America First’ - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-11-15/the-wo... | https://archive.today/m67tK - November 15th, 2025