Illustration: Liu Xidan/GT

A European delegation led by the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa went to Beijing to talk with Chinese President Xi Jinping about the state of the economic relationship between the two sides a couple of weeks ago. While the summit between China and the EU yielded some common ground, some signals from the European side to this day still suggest some concerns toward economic relations with China.

A few days later, in a golf field in Scotland, the same European Commission President took off the mask that she wore in China and "surrendered" without condition (similarly to NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte a few weeks ago) to the US President Donald Trump, accepting an economic settlement that you can call "balanced," as many European leaders did, only if you think one should always "bend the knees" to US' rule. Doing this, the EU and NATO leaders showed the utmost disregard for the European peoples' true interests.

Someone may think that "bent at the knees" is an expression that is unfair or exaggerated. However, these are the exact words used by Trump's deputy assistant and top counter-terrorism adviser Sebastian Gorka in an article on US right-wing website Newsmax. "And today's deal, even for somebody like me who has known the president for a decade now, it is hard to believe that the whole EU bent at the knee of America First and said, 'OK, we're not going to be free riders anymore. We're not going to exploit the global trade system. You got us, President Trump, and we are going to surrender to a 15 percent tariff,'" said Gorka.

The two episodes are a plastic image of this Europe's lack of perspective: The Union cuts itself out in the relationship with the economic bigger actor of the planet, China, and passively accepts the chain imposed by a US moving haphazardly, trying not to be crumbled by its cyclopic national debt. US tariffs have risen significantly to 15 percent, with those on aluminum and steel remaining at 50 percent, and some sectors, such as pharmaceuticals and semiconductors, are excluded from the agreement. Furthermore, the EU has committed to investing $600 billion in the US and to spend another $750 billion on energy by 2028. These numbers are so huge that one wonders if, in some instances, such as the energy field, the figures are unrealistic, engineered only to give the impression of the Trump administration's overwhelming victory. As a heavily productive continent substantially without raw materials, depending on such expensive US energy, Europe has condemned itself to industrial decline. The Trump administration is expecting, with open arms, the leading European factories to relocate to the US. 

Some rare critical voices, as that of French Prime Minister Fran?ois Bayrou, raised a faint voice against. He wrote on X that what he called "the Von der Leyen-Trump deal" was "a dark day when an alliance of free peoples, brought together to affirm their common values and to defend their common interests, resigns itself to submission." Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the leader of the industrially stronger country in Europe, Germany, said that his country has avoided a "needless escalation in transatlantic trade relations" but had to recognize that Germany will face "substantial damage" from the tariffs. Finally, Merz gave voice to the most defining sentiment in the EU, impotence, "We couldn't expect to achieve anymore," he said.

This Europe of military spending build-up and welfare build-down has no future. The EU, an economic and political union of 27 member states, from a historical and geopolitical point of view, is a "monster" bound to find it hard to work from the beginning, with its complete disregard for history and geopolitics. For years, Washington surveilled her long labor, from 2002, when the euro was introduced, to ensure that the new hybrid machine could not function. The end of this kind of Europe is only a question of time. But it should be the strongest error to abandon the ideal of a united, powerful and truly sovereign Europe with a genuine foreign policy, a genuine army and a common body of law. It is a union that has to preserve its people's differences in a common frame of solidarity and, yes, with a strong socialist prejudice. 

Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at Pompeu Fabra University in Spain. Claudio Gallo is an Italian journalist and former foreign desk editor and London correspondent at Italian newspaper La Stampa. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn