The Biden administration spent four years building a united front with Europe to counter China. A month into President Donald Trump’s second term, that united front is becoming collateral damage as the new administration dramatically upends former President Joe Biden’s approach, befriending Russia and alienating Europe.
In the wake of Trump’s wrecking ball, China is now probing opportunities to build its own united front with Europe.
The Biden administration spent four years building a united front with Europe to counter China. A month into President Donald Trump’s second term, that united front is becoming collateral damage as the new administration dramatically upends former President Joe Biden’s approach, befriending Russia and alienating Europe.
In the wake of Trump’s wrecking ball, China is now probing opportunities to build its own united front with Europe.
At the Munich Security Conference last Friday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi had a slew of meetings with European leaders and made a direct appeal to them in his speech. “China has always seen in Europe an important pole in the multipolar world. … China is willing to work with the European side to deepen strategic communication and mutually beneficial cooperation,” he said.
In contrast to Trump’s approach of sidelining Ukraine to discuss an end to the war directly with Russia, Wang curried favor with his European counterparts by supporting their right to a seat at the negotiating table. In his meeting with European Union foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas, Wang said China “supports Europe’s important role in the peace talks.”
“The rise of U.S.-EU friction offers Beijing certainly a fantastic opportunity to reconcile with the EU and a lot of European countries that have resented China’s Russia policy,” said Xuewu Gu, the chair in international relations at the University of Bonn’s Institute for Political Sciences and Sociology.
Of course, Europe won’t easily forget China’s support for Russia’s war effort, which has been a key factor in driving Brussels away from Beijing over the past three years. But as Trump pushes European nations to up their defense spending to 5 percent and signals that U.S. support for the bloc may fade, European leaders may yet take the bait.
On top of that, the EU and China also share a common plight, which may draw them together. Trump has already flung new tariffs at both: 10 percent tariffs on all Chinese goods and 25 percent tariffs on imports of aluminum and steel from all countries, including European allies. And more tariffs are on their way. Trump has pledged to make U.S. trade “reciprocal” across the world, matching all tariffs and taxes applied to U.S. goods with new tariffs at home, and the EU is among the list of targets.
As the EU faces a rising economic burden from the tariffs and increased defense spending, China might become a more essential economic lifeline.
“Some major economies within the European Union, especially Germany or some others—I think they will try to have more balanced relations between China and the U.S., because once you have more tariffs from Washington towards the European Union, Germany, and some other economies, they will suffer a lot,” said Cui Hongjian, a professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University’s Academy of Regional and Global Governance.
The EU walked away from a comprehensive trade deal with China in early 2021 as relations with China worsened. Cui suggested that both sides might work to revive that deal to blunt the impact of U.S. tariffs.
Some European nations have already signaled more openness to China. Germany, which has a significant trade and manufacturing relationship with the country, hasn’t been as harsh in its stance toward Beijing in recent years; it voted against the EU tariffs on Chinese electric car imports last year, for instance. The United Kingdom, under Labour leadership, has also increased its diplomatic outreach to China.
In recent speeches, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who previously led the assertive turn in EU policy toward China, has also hinted at a potential thaw. “We will keep de-risking our economic relationship, as we have been doing in recent years. But there is also room to engage constructively with China and find solutions in our mutual interest. And I think we can find agreements that could even expand our trade and investment ties. It is a fine line that we need to walk,” she told EU ambassadors gathered in Brussels in early February, echoing remarks she made at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the previous month.
Yet the U.S.-China-EU dynamic is still very much in flux. “We think, under the pressures of the Trump second term, theoretically, there is opportunity for Beijing and Brussels to go back to pragmatical cooperation,” said Shi Yan, a fellow at Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy. “But still, the U.S. is a factor. We are not sure now what kind of pressures there will be from the United States [on] Europe towards China, because during Trump’s first term it was really bad.” In one example, during Trump’s first administration, U.S. officials pressured the EU to reject Huawei technology from their 5G networks, with partial success.
European officials, meanwhile, are descending on Washington to try to court Trump and his team. On Wednesday, Maros Sefcovic, the European commissioner for trade and economic security, met with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in Washington. In that meeting, the EU leaned back into the idea of a united front against China. “As closest allies, as trans-Atlantic partners, we also discussed how to deal with China, especially from the perspective of nonmarket practices, of overcapacities, and I would say the issues which we are dealing with also in the European Union,” Sefcovic told reporters Thursday.
French President Emmanuel Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer are scheduled to visit Trump next week as well, which may shift the trans-Atlantic tone.
“I think we still have to wait to see how this falls out. Some people are shocked, some people are angry in Europe, but I don’t think there’s an appetite for really close relations with China. There’s an appetite for maintaining, by and large, this policy we had, toning down a bit criticism of China,” said Liselotte Odgaard, a nonresident senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
FP staff writer Rishi Iyengar contributed reporting to this article.
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