Open but Secure Europe%E2%80%99s Path to Strategic Interdependence 2025

Introduction By Mark Leonard, Director, European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) Strategic interdependence is the right guiding principle for a Europe that must manage new vulnerabilities without closing itself off from the world. The dashboard is flashing red. Donald Trump’s second presidential election win1 on 5 November 2024 marks a turning point for the North Atlantic alliance, probably one much more substantive than his first win back in 2016. It demonstrates the feeling among many Americans that the prevailing approach to globalization and international engagement demands re-evaluation. But it is also a symptom of something deeper: a shift from the traditional Western-led political, economic and security order to a more complex landscape characterized by increasing multipolarity and fragmentation. Americans are not alone in wanting to revise the post-Cold War global order. China promotes what it calls a “dual circulation” approach to trade, focusing on boosting domestic self-reliance while safeguarding against American-imposed sanctions and tariffs.2 Middle powers such as India, Turkey, Brazil and South Africa have sought to limit their dependence on the United States’ financial system and have seen their regional freedom of manoeuvre grow exponentially.3 In Europe, where the shock of these changes has hit particularly hard, debate rages over how the continent should position itself. The European project, after all, was built on principles which may now seem anachronistic in a world of great-power competition; including the belief that pooling the coal and steel industries which had been used to wage war would create a common economic interest strong enough to render future conflict unthinkable. After the end of the Cold War, Europeans sought to extend this logic beyond their borders. They built up closer relationships with Russia and China in the hope they would become stakeholders in a new world order; and they continued to rely on the US for their security needs. But global events and power shifts have challenged this world view in recent times. Great-power politics has become like a loveless marriage where the couple cannot stand each other’s company but are unable to get divorced. As with any unhappy couple, it is the things that were shared during the good times that become the means to do harm during the bad ones. In a collapsing marriage, vindictive partners will use the children, the dog and the holiday home to hurt each other. In geopolitics, it is trade, finance, the movement of people, responses to pandemics and climate change – and above all the internet – that are being weaponized. And Europeans are uniquely intertwined with the rest of the world; be it economically, or on energy, technology or defence. These dependencies came into sharp focus during Trump’s first period in office. Although Europeans were subjected to various humiliations during his four years as president, the US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – also known as the Iran nuclear deal – in 2018 and the European Union’s subsequent inability to hold up the deal on its own was a particular turning point. It laid bare European impotence and led to pained debates around “strategic autonomy” and “European sovereignty”. These debates only intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As if constricted supply chain and energy dependence on Russia were not enough, Europeans must now also contend with challenges related to Chinese overcapacity and the possible loss of America as a security provider. This economic and security crisis is taking place within a wider crisis of European identity. Europeans broadly acknowledge4 that abandoning globalization in exchange for self-reliance, autarchy and decoupling is not feasible. Strategic autonomy, as coined by French president Emmanuel Macron, remains a divisive concept, viewed by many other European policy-makers as primarily anti-American.5 But as Europeans reflect on the trade-offs between autonomy and interdependence, they risk succumbing to a sense of helplessness and a lack of unified agency, where each European country seeks its own path and ultimately resorts to placating the great powers. The US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and the European Union’s subsequent inability to hold up the deal on its own laid bare Europe’s impotence. Open but Secure: Europe’s Path to Strategic Interdependence 4