Europe hunts for chokepoints it can weaponise against China in age of economic warfare
Bureaucrats look for leverage against coercion from Beijing and Washington but what would it take for Brussels to act?
Trade bureaucrats are building a database of potential chokepoints that can be squeezed as deterrents or reactions to bullying by other powers, according to officials involved.
“We have dependencies that others weaponise but others are also dependent on us,” Sabine Weyand, the EU’s top trade official, said in the European Parliament last week.
“How can we move from a reactive attitude to a proactive attitude, one where we are not just trying to protect ourselves against weaknesses, but where we are also leveraging our strength?”
Work on the “economic security doctrine” comes as the world of rigid rules upon which the European Union was built crumbles.
The bloc finds itself squeezed ever tighter by US President Donald Trump’s coercive use of trade tariffs and China’s chokehold on critical raw materials, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens to spread to a broader European land war.