When an August 2025 photograph from the Oval Office showed Donald Trump seated behind his desk, lecturing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and a row of confused European leaders, it instantly became a symbol of Europe’s geopolitical reality. Commentators’ complaint that the European heads of state were seated like “schoolchildren” captured a reality that policymakers still refuse to admit: Europe’s autonomy is a myth sustained by rhetoric and vision, not real power or agency.1
With the Second Cold War now fully underway, Europe can no longer afford to drift without a realistic and mature Grand Strategy.2 The new Cold War is not a return to the ideological standoff of the 20th century, but a structural rivalry in which China and Russia have developed a functioning modus operandi of strategic coordination across military, technological, financial, informational, and political domains – an alignment steered deliberately from the top by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
In this environment, the European continent sits uncomfortably between two geopolitical chairs: on one side, a new America that is redefining its global priorities, shifting its strategic center of gravity toward the Indo-Pacific, and demanding that Europe assume greater and more credible responsibilities for its own security; on the other, a rising China whose global ambitions are amplified by its partnership with a revanchist Russia. Europe is caught in this tightening grip of systemic competition, yet it has not articulated the political will, the defense posture, or the economic alignment required to navigate it. A mature European Grand Strategy would require more than new documents or declarations. It would demand a clear-eyed assessment of Europe’s vulnerabilities, the prioritization of hard-power capabilities, and a realistic alignment of economic, technological, and military resources. Above all, it would require the political courage to abandon comforting illusions – about strategic autonomy, about the universality of a rules-based order, and about the permanence of unconditional American protection. Europe will be forced to confront an uncomfortable reality: in a world defined by systemic rivalry and the weaponization of interdependence, it cannot remain neutral or sit between strategic poles.
Europe’s Strategic Mirage
For decades, Brussels has repeated the phrase “strategic autonomy” as a mantra. Back in 1998, the St. Malo Declaration between France and the UK stated that the EU “must have the capacity for autonomous action.”3 The EU Global Strategy of June 2016 institutionalized “strategic autonomy” as a guiding principle of EU external action.4 After 2016, the idea expanded beyond defense into economic, technological, and energy domains following Trump’s first term, Brexit, and Covid-19 pandemic.
After Russia’s launch of full-scale war on Ukraine in 2022, the concept promised an independent Europe capable of acting geoeconomically, technologically, and militarily without Washington’s comprehensive support.5 In “strategic autonomy,” Europe had finally found an identity-defining narrative that could unify its fragmented interests and ambitions.
Yet since 2022, the continent has only grown increasingly dependent on the United States. Across the domains of energy, technology, supply chains, market access, tariffs, finance, and security, Europe may be more dependent on the United States than at almost any time since the Cold War.
Genuine autonomy would demand sacrifices Europe has so far been unwilling to make. For example: dismantling its welfare architecture, raising retirement ages, reviving nuclear energy in countries such as Germany, reintroducing resource extraction, and investing at least five percent of GDP in defense to outperform Russian long-term warfare effort against Ukraine and the European security order. According to European Central Bank (ECB) estimations, the energy, digital and defense transformation would require more than €1.2 trillion per year until 2030.6 These are not technical adjustments; they would require major investments by a continent in structural decline.7 Without them, “strategic autonomy” remains an aspiration devoid of material power.
Even with these investments, true strategic autonomy would require a shift in mindset. European leaders would need to be willing to act and bear responsibility when it comes to national interests and the questions of war and peace. Only a handful of state actors currently do this, including the United States, China, Russia, and to some extent, India, Israel, and Türkiye. Each of these states is willing to assert its interests unilaterally and, when necessary, militarily. Europe as a collective actor is not.
This raises an unavoidable question: if Europe lacks the mindset, capabilities, and political cohesion required for true strategic autonomy, then it must reconsider whether “strategic autonomy” is even a meaningful or valuable strategic goal in the first place.
The DragonBear and the New Cold War
The global order has already bifurcated into two systemic poles, with 2025 marking a tipping point in international affairs.8 On one side stands the United States and its network of allies; on the other, the “DragonBear”– a term I coined back in 2015 to reference the modus operandi of the deepening strategic coordination between China and Russia in all systemically relevant domains.9 This alignment is meanwhile unprecedented in scope and endurance: an asymmetric, multi-domain partnership that combines Chinese technological and industrial capacity with Russian limitless raw materials and hard power.
Europe remains a spectator. Its institutions regulate rather than innovate. Its political elites debate frameworks and values, while others design futures with skin in the game. This structural conservatism, born of moral comfort and institutional inertia, has turned the continent into a museum of norms in an age of emerging systemic rivalry between two hard powers.
Similar to the first Cold War, the confrontation between the United States and the DragonBear is not merely ideological; it is technological, geoeconomic, and cognitive. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has turned technology into a decisive arena of global power competition. Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing, and autonomous defense systems are not peripheral tools. They are the foundation of national survival and define the new game changers in the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China. As in every past industrial revolution, the winner of the Fourth will take it all, and with victory will come the power to impose new rules on the world order. Control over data, software, and dual-use technologies will determine who drafts the laws of the global economy and who enforces them in the global arena.10
European monetary dependency reinforces the continent’s strategic vulnerability. The U.S. dollar remains the world’s dominant reserve and transaction currency, on at least one side of nearly 90 percent of FX trades.11 The euro trails well behind that share. During the 2020 pandemic crisis, the Federal Reserve extended swap-lines of about US $450 billion, stabilizing global liquidity.12 Europe’s autonomy ends where the dollar begins. As long as the continent lacks monetary sovereignty and its digital asset ecosystem remains weak compared with dollar-based alternatives, its economic independence remains rhetorical.
The European Union possesses the latent scale to rival the geoeconomic weight of the United States and China, yet it lacks the cohesion to project it. In an era defined by the weaponization of interdependence, through export controls, rare earths, semiconductors, and energy sanctions, Europe finds itself increasingly squeezed between the two blocs it seeks to balance. Rather than mastering economic statecraft, it is increasingly subjected to it, relying on American security guarantees and Chinese supply chains to sustain its own prosperity.
The Mindset Deficit
What Europe lacks above all is the right mindset. Strategic culture begins with self-perception and clear-eyed realism. During the first Cold War, Europe’s post-war generation knew what it meant to fight for survival next to the Soviet Union. Democracies then were neither naïve nor complacent. They understood that deterrence rested on conviction and acknowledgment of reality, coupled with technological, industrial, and hard-power capacities.
Today, Europe’s post-heroic societies are demographically aging, psychologically fatigued, and ideologically divided due to hubris, moral complacency, and strategic passivity.13 Most of all, we are ill-prepared for confrontation because societal resilience, the collective capacity to absorb shocks and adapt, has steadily eroded, while the notion of sacrifice for sovereignty has lost meaning. Even massive investments in armament and reindustrialization will not compensate for the absence of civic resilience.
The European Union has mastered the language of risk mitigation but forgotten the grammar of hard power. Strategic autonomy, as discussed in every policy forum, no longer merely requires tanks or tariffs; it requires the right mindset. A continent that hesitates to define its interests cannot defend them. The unwillingness and inability to recognize the reality of the new Cold War is the defining symptom of a continent in denial. The fundamental distinction between Europe and the United States today lies not in capability but in cognition. America debates how to win the new Cold War. Europe debates whether the contest even exists.
This is why the dream of strategic autonomy is not merely unrealistic but dangerous. It misleads European citizens into believing that sovereignty can be bureaucratically managed, rather than defended through power projection, industrial capacity, and individual self-sacrifice.
The Cost of Narration
The world is no longer defined by simple linear causality. Actions and non-actions generate ripple effects that defy predictions. Policymakers who think only in first-order consequences misread the complexity of systemic transformation. Europe’s long period of prosperity and influence was enabled by external pillars – an American security umbrella, Chinese manufacturing power, and Russian energy – and was therefore less a product of European strategy than an unintended consequence of its own complacency over the past thirty years.
The next phase of global power competition will emerge from technological convergence and geopolitical bifurcation. To navigate it, Europe needs second-order thinking: the ability to anticipate not only outcomes but the feedback loops between them. That requires a culture of strategic foresight linking government, industry, academia, and citizens. It demands scenario planning, not slogans; systems analysis, not ideology. The absence of strategic foresight today will translate into the absence of strategic options tomorrow.
Europe’s current elites still live in what can be called a “narrated world,” a reality facilitated by institutions, consultants, and public relations machinery. Narration replaces analysis; virtue replaces vision. For three decades, European societies were told that history had ended and that globalization would dissolve geopolitics. The illusion produced intellectual disarmament. For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine or China weaponized trade, the continent was shocked, not because these events were unforeseeable, but because they contradicted its preferred narratives. Strategic communication cannot substitute for strategic comprehension.
The Strategic Trilemma
Europe’s political and institutional elites face a new 3-D trilemma they rarely acknowledge: the tension of prioritization between defense gaps, deindustrialization, and the decarbonization agenda. To rebuild military strength and preserve industrial competitiveness, Europe must invest trillions annually in dual-use industries, raw materials, and energy security. Yet each euro diverted to industry or defense undermines the European Commission’s “Green Deal” timetable. On the other side, each regulatory constraint linked to climate accelerates deindustrialization, according to industrial players.14
In the background, climate alarmism is rapidly losing the narrative war. Even Bill Gates recently created waves by stating that while climate change will bring serious disruption, it will not bring about humanity’s demise and urged a shift in focus toward human welfare and innovation.15
The truth is Europe’s climate goals are already being redrawn under pressure from member states, and this became unmistakable just recently when the European Parliament, relying on a center-right and right-populist majority, approved diluted 2040 targets and postponed key Green Deal provisions ahead of COP30.16 Europe’s dependence on external inputs, from rare earths to semiconductors, from to fertilizers and energy systems, remains structural. However, diversification and strategic autonomy in all three key domains – defense spending, reindustrialization, and decarbonization, even under optimal conditions – will require at least a decade of massive, sustained investment and political resolve. Something has to give in this impossible equation.
From Mindset to Action
To recover agency, Europe must first articulate what it stands for beyond comfort and regulation. The starting point is intellectual: to acknowledge that the new Cold War is not a metaphor but a structural reality. The DragonBear will not dissolve through diplomacy, and America’s patience is not infinite.
Next, Europe must translate awareness into capacity by linking industrial and defense policy, incentivizing capital investment, and embedding innovation within security planning. Dual-use technologies, from AI-driven tools to quantum encryption, should define the next generation of European deterrence.
Finally, Europe must reform its leadership class. Institutions that cannot prioritize or exercise agency will never produce strategy. Renewal will come only with a generational shift, led by those who understand that freedom is not merely inherited, but must be safeguarded, defended, and sustained.
Grand Strategy, or the Absence Thereof
What Europe calls “strategic autonomy” is in fact just a collection of administrative documents. A true “grand strategy,” by contrast, is an organizing narrative that defines purpose, threat perception, and trajectory of action linked to agency and capabilities. The United States has one: global primacy. China has one based on rejuvenation through technological and industrial dominance. Russia has one about control over the old continent through war and coercion. Europe has none. Without a guiding vision, Europe oscillates between moralism and denial. It preaches multilateralism to a world of blocs, advocates dialogue to adversaries who weaponize it, and confuses consensus with strength. The outcome is strategic drift and irrelevance.
Any grand strategy must begin with a realistic appraisal of our strategic limits. Europe today stands before three strategic choices.
First, the path of genuine autonomy: a generational transformation demanding economic, demographic, and cultural mobilization. This route would cost trillions, require deep welfare reform, and depend on a societal consensus that currently does not exist.
Second, the path of structured dependency: accepting alignment with the United States as a condition of survival. This is the continent’s current trajectory, though Europeans often deny it. The tripolar diversification of the past based on Russian energy, Chinese industry, and American security has collapsed. What remains is reliance on Washington’s security umbrella, technological ecosystem, and industrial capacity. The photograph from the Oval Office was more than symbolism. It was a warning.
Third, the path of accommodation with China, currently known under the euphemism of the “de-risking” approach. This would constitute geopolitical self-harm. It would empower the DragonBear, undermine Europe’s deterrence posture, and erode transatlantic trust.
Hybrid variants between these options produce incoherence, fragmentation, and paralysis: the very symptoms visible today in Brussels and national capitals.
The “Free World Coalition”
A pragmatic alternative exists: integration into a broader Free World Coalition built on three pillars – security and defense, technology, and geoeconomics. This framework would not be a hierarchical extension of NATO but a horizontal network of like-minded democracies: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union as a collective actor of democracies, and aligned states such as Norway, Switzerland, Australia, Japan, and South Korea, to name a few.
Europe’s path to renewed agency lies not in emancipation from the West but in deepened integration within it as an equal partner with clearly defined responsibilities. Within this configuration, Europe would anchor its future in shared technological ecosystems, including cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence, cyber defense, and energy resilience, while strengthening political agency. The purpose is not subordination but synchronization.
The Free World Coalition represents a grand strategy in itself, not a nostalgic revival of Atlanticism. It binds Europe, North America, and democratic Indo-Pacific partners into a single ecosystem of security, technology, and markets. NATO would remain the military spine but no longer the sole instrument. Parallel structures would synchronize strategic assets, production lines, and supply chains, transforming dependency into functional interoperability as a deliberate convergence of strengths among democracies.
Such an alliance could merge the transatlantic defense market, harmonize export controls, and establish a joint investment framework for critical minerals, semiconductors, and AI research. It could evolve into a Euro-Atlantic common market for data, logistics, and workforce mobility as an organically emerging architecture of interdependence by design rather than default.
This vision demands political courage and strategic honesty. Europe cannot protect its prosperity or democracy alone. A Free World Coalition would not erase European identity; it would preserve it in a hostile world. Strategic interdependence among democracies is a force multiplier. In an age when autocracies integrate power vertically, democracies must learn to integrate it horizontally. The ultimate test of this alliance will not be summits or communiqués but the capacity to act collectively in the face of systemic disruption amid the new Cold War between the United States and the DragonBear.
The Hour of Decision
The window for strategic choice is narrowing. In less than a decade, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will have designated its winner. The “winner takes all” logic applies not just to markets but also to systems. The state or alliance that masters the convergence of technology, finance, economic statecraft, and military power will dictate the norms of the 21st century.
If the United States prevails, the liberal order, adapted but intact, will endure. If the DragonBear gains technological parity, the world will slide toward authoritarian synchronization. Europe’s refusal to decide is itself a decision, one that leads to marginalization and what Mario Draghi called the “slow agony.”17 The only logical path is deeper integration into a revived and renewed trans-Atlantic bond – geoeconomically, geopolitically, and geotechnologically. Anything short of this will leave the continent exposed, fragmented, and strategically irrelevant in the face of a consolidated China-Russia axis and a reshaped global order.
The immediate task before Europe is therefore not to dream of autonomy but to choose alignment. The Free World Coalition, anchored in defense integration, technological innovation, and shared democratic values, offers the only sustainable path. It transforms dependency into partnership and weakness into strategic purpose.
The Generational Reckoning
Europe’s post-Cold-War generation grew up believing that peace was permanent and that history was optional. It is now learning that both were privileges, not rights. The next global competition, like the first Cold War, will once again require alignment without illusion. It will revolve around geopolitical blocs, geoeconomic corridors, and geotechnological spheres of innovation and influence.
The coming decade will test whether Europe can reinvent itself as a conscious actor in global affairs or become a geographic backyard between two geopolitical blocs. The outcome depends on whether its societies rediscover purpose and the conviction that their model of freedom, prosperity, and pluralism is worth defending.
This is not nostalgia for the 20th century. It is recognition that the 21st century demands the same resilience that built the previous one. If Europe refuses that responsibility, the DragonBear will defeat it – or simply outlast it.
The continent must move from moral aspiration to strategic execution. Europe can still shape this order, but only by acting as a coherent pole within the emerging Free World Coalition, while aligning with the United States as a condition of survival. Each choice Europe avoids will be made for it by others.
Every delay deepens dependency and hubris. In a bifurcating world, neutrality means strategic passivity, and that is the slow death of the continent.
- Mike Bedigan, “New Pics of Trump Holding Court in Oval Office Branded ‘Embarrassing’ as World Leaders Sit Around His Desk: ‘Like Schoolchildren,’” The Independent, August 19, 2025; Robert Cutler, “European Sovereignty Is Illusory Because Ambition Is Not Agency,” Strategy International, October 23, 2025. ↩︎
- Velina Tchakarova, “Is a Cold War 2.0 Inevitable?,” Observer Research Foundation Expert Speak: Raisina Debates, April 23, 2021. ↩︎
- United Kingdom and France, “Joint Declaration on European Defence,” joint declaration, Saint-Malo, December 4, 1998. ↩︎
- “Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe — A Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy,” European External Action Service, June 2016. ↩︎
- Charlotte Beaucillon, “Strategic Autonomy: A New Identity for the EU as a Global Actor,” European Papers, July 27, 2023. ↩︎
- Othman Bouabdallah, Ettore Dorrucci, Carolin Nerlich, et al, “Time to Be Strategic: How Public Money Could Power Europe’s Green, Digital and Defence Transitions,” The ECB Blog, July 25, 2025. ↩︎
- Emmanuel Macron, “Europe—It Can Die. A New Paradigm …,” Groupe d’études géopolitiques, April 26, 2024. ↩︎
- Robert M. Cutler, “In the Grip of Global Bifurcation: The EU and its Possible Futures,” Baku Dialogues, July 31, 2025; Tchakarova, “Is a Cold War 2.0 Inevitable?” ↩︎
- Velina Tchakarova, “Enter the ‘DragonBear’: The Russia–China Partnership and What It Means for Geopolitics,” Observer Research Foundation Issue Brief, August 14, 2023. ↩︎
- Tchakarova, “Is a Cold War 2.0 Inevitable?” ↩︎
- Bafundi Maronoti, “Revisiting the International Role of the U.S. Dollar,” BIS Quarterly Review, December 2022. ↩︎
- Matthew Wells, “The Fed’s Dollar Liquidity Swap Lines: During the COVID-19 Pandemic, the Fed Loaned Billions of Dollars to Central Banks in Desperate Need of Them.” Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Econ Focus, Q4 2024. ↩︎
- Tine Molendijk, “War Is Back in Post-Heroic Europe: Change and Continuity in the Relationship Between the Armed Forces and Society,
.” Armed Forces & Society, (2024). ↩︎ - “Offener Brief: 80 europäische Industrieunternehmen warnen vor Deindustrialisierung durch zu hohe CO2-Kosten in Europa,” Industrieallianz, October 21, 2025. ↩︎
- Bill Gates, “Three Tough Truths about Climate: What I Want Everyone at COP30 to Know,” GatesNotes, October 23, 2025. ↩︎
- Mark Hallam, “European Parliament Backs Diluted 2040 Climate Targets,
.” Deutsche Welle, November 13, 2025. ↩︎ - Philip Blenkinsop, “Draghi Urges EU to Catch Up with Rivals or Face ‘Slow Agony,’” Reuters, September 9, 2024. ↩︎