EU Discovers Economic Ties Come With, You Know, Ties
Bloomberg breathlessly reports that the EU's "deep economic ties to China" are now "hampering its ability to punish Russia." One might wonder if this was ever *not* going to be the case. For decades, Europe's ravenous appetite for cheap Chinese goods and Beijing's endless demand for European luxury (and tech) has been paramount, a relationship cultivated by successive EU commissions that
prioritized quarterly profits over, say, strategic autonomy. Now, suddenly, the bill for that short-sightedness has arrived, and it seems the check is written in yuan. The current lament feels less like a warning and more like an admission of a self-inflicted wound. It's almost as if the EU leadership believed they could perpetually outsource their manufacturing base to China and simultaneously
maintain an unfettered moral high ground from which to dictate global affairs. How many 'strategic dependencies' does one continent need before it realizes that economic integration with a global superpower isn't a one-way street of benefits? The 'cost of doing business' now involves a geopolitical paralysis they themselves engineered.