Is Europe the loser in the new great power struggle between US, Russia and China?

When Europe’s top leaders signed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 to lay down the foundation of the European Union, the emergence of this new bloc of rich and powerful nations marked a seminal moment for the post-World War II order. 

Three decades later, the dream has soured, and the project to unify the continent across financial, economic, political, and defence sectors appears to be faltering. 

The United Kingdom, for long one of Europe’s most influential states and a major global power until the end of WWII, left the EU through its controversial Brexit referendum five years ago, plunging the union into uncertainty.

But the worst was yet to come.

Russia’s war on Ukraine and Trump’s aggressive ‘America First’ policy have exposed the vulnerabilities of the bloc, leaving its flanks exposed to Moscow in the absence of iron-clad American security guarantees. 

An August meeting between Trump and European leaders on the Ukraine war in the White House was emblematic in this regard. The US president’s peers from the other side of the Atlantic “crowded around Trump's desk” like soldiers ready to take orders from their American commander. 

Last week, Trump went a step further. 

On Friday, the White House released a 33-page US National Security Strategy document, which did not spare any kind words for Europe, criticising American allies on the other side of the Atlantic for their “lack of self-confidence” on various issues – from military status to democratic standards – and losing its identity to migration that would lead to a “civilisational erasure”. 

According to the document, Europe faces many problems partly due to EU policies, which “undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”

From Brexit to the Ukraine war and the Trump administration’s recent salvos against Europe point to the old continent’s declining international influence and a backseat role in the newly accelerated great power struggle between the US, Russia and China, according to analysts. 

“From the standpoint of pure geopolitical and military power, the argument can be made that Europe has seen some level of decline in recent years and even decades,” says Eugene Chausovsky, a defence expert and a senior director on analytical development and training at the New Lines Institute, Washington DC. 

Negative impacts

While Chausovsky does not want to categorically characterise Europe as the loser in this power struggle due to its autonomous status based on complex relationships with each other, he concedes that the old continent “has certainly faced negative impacts of this power struggle in many ways”.

The “negative impacts”, according to Chausovsky, are most notably tied to the US-Russia negotiations over the Ukraine war, from which Trump has almost excluded European leaders, including Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

In a recent leaked phone call, French President Emmanuel Macron was heard warning the Ukrainian President not to trust Trump because he could “betray Ukraine”, demonstrating an increasing trust deficit between European and US leaderships and a decrease in the EU’s influence over Washington. 

But the Europe-US mistrust is not limited to the Ukraine war. 

Another reason for the EU’s declining fortunes in international affairs is the US-China trade talks, which have put European leaders in a precarious situation on their commercial and technological ties with the world’s two biggest economies. 

For the record, the EU was forced to sign an unfavourable tariff deal with Washington, says Chausovsky. 

“But Europe has also leveraged this power struggle in other ways, such as re-energising its economic autonomy and military development,” he says, adding that “Europe still has enormous economic and regulatory power collectively, and the bloc is an important player on the world stage, albeit in different and more nuanced ways than the US, Russia, and China”.

Like Chausovsky, Muzaffer Senel, a visiting scholar of the Department of Politics at Binghamton University, also believes that dismissing Europe as a clear loser in the new great power competition would be “too early”. 

Despite the EU's slow bureaucratic process and member-states’ veto powers, Brussels seeks new pathways to compete better with China, the US and Russia, Senel says, citing the EU's 2021 Global Gateway policy initiative, which aims to strengthen connectivity, international networks and partnerships, promoting sustainable development.

EU vs national sovereignty 

Experts also draw attention to the fact that the EU project, which has policies bringing limitations on individual countries’ sovereignty through various regulations – from financial measures to climate decisions – makes some member-states question the legitimacy of the union’s supranational character, leading to the growing influence of nationalistic and far-right movements. 

Unlike the federally-governed US, “the EU, a federative project, is not the government of Europe,” says Sergei Markov, a Russian academic and a former adviser to Vladimir Putin, referring to a deep-rooted paradox in relation to the EU’s assertion to be a supranational authority and its lack of enforcement power over individual member-states. 

But Markov says that European elites, well-aware of this contradiction, want to use the Ukraine war and fears that it might spread to other parts of Europe as a tactical leverage over member-states to accept the authority of the union’s supranational entities like the European Commission. 

During an annual address to EU lawmakers in September, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that “battlelines for a new world order, based on power, are being drawn right now. A new Europe must emerge,” emphasising the need to increase the power of EU institutions. 

Markov refers to what he calls “anti-Russia hysteria” and the European elites’ push for empowerment of EU institutions at the expense of individual states’ sovereignty as the potential causes of the decline of European democracy. 

To buttress his claim, Markov cites Berlin’s pressure campaign against the far-right Alternative for Germany party and the arrest of France’s nationalist leader Marine Le Pen, who polled the second most votes in a 2023 public popularity survey.

He also points to increasing threats from Brussels against the Hungarian leadership as the EU’s recent anti-democratic measures.  

Is Europe ‘less important’ for populist Trump?

The US has long provided a security umbrella to Europe through NATO, which has deterred external threats like Russia and helped continental leaders and elites address their divisions and differences with historical roots. 

Some leading analysts feel that the US is seeking a quick end to the Ukraine war by brokering a deal with Russia to focus on the Chinese threat, aiming to pivot toward the Pacific. As a result, the US has no longer been willing to play a “pacifier” role in Europe. 

According to Markov, the US prioritises its Pacific focus over protecting Europe, which has become less important in the eyes of American policymakers, pushing the EU into “a geopolitical loneliness” and sharpening political differences between leftist and right-wing groups on what Europe and the EU should represent. 

Chausovsky of the New Lines Institute agrees.

“This pivot plays a very significant role in Europe’s concerns, one that has been particularly acute in the US’s handling of the Ukraine crisis under the Trump administration by means that Europe (and Ukraine) are not comfortable with.” 

European leaders become more nervous in the face of Vladimir Putin’s escalating rhetoric toward both Ukraine and the EU. The Russian leader has recently suggested that Russia is capable of taking over the whole Donbass region in eastern Ukraine, issuing a stark threat to European leaders that Moscow is “ready” for a war with them.  

Russia’s confident stance has been partly rooted in European divisions, most clearly in the war in Ukraine and in the post-Soviet sphere more generally across Eastern Europe from Hungary to Slovakia, which have governments with friendly relations with Moscow. 

The Ukraine conflict, coupled with US trade policy, has highlighted “the limitations of European strategic reliance on the US”, according to Chausovsky. 

While this relationship will continue to be indispensable even in an uncertain global environment, Europe needs to seek “diversified relationships maintaining crucial economic and security ties with the US to the extent that it is able to develop unique ways to leverage its economic and regulatory power.”