The table for two
Washington and Beijing are negotiating the terms of global order. Europe was not asked.
Trump landed in Beijing this morning. The agenda: rare earths, the Strait of Hormuz, trade commitments, Taiwan, artificial intelligence. Tim Cook flew with him. Elon Musk too.
Europe was not invited. That is not an oversight.
What is being negotiated in Beijing this week is not a list of bilateral grievances. It is something closer to the operating terms of the global economy — who controls the chokepoints of energy, technology, and industrial supply, and on what conditions. The Strait of Hormuz matters because half of China’s crude comes through it. Rare earths matter because China controls ninety percent of global refining and used that leverage to make Trump fold once already. Taiwan matters because it sits at the intersection of every strategic calculation both sides are running. These are not trade disputes. They are negotiations over who sets the parameters.
Europe is affected by all of it. It is present in none of it.
The EU’s leverage in the global economy is market access — the world’s largest consumer bloc, a regulatory standard-setter, a destination that shapes supply chains by virtue of its size. What it does not hold are chokepoints. It does not secure sea lanes. It does not control critical inputs. It is not a military factor in the Indo-Pacific. In a world organized around open markets, that was a viable position. In a world being reorganized around controlled dependencies, market size is a secondary instrument. The power sits with whoever controls what the market cannot do without.
One analyst noted this week that any energy deal struck in Beijing — say, China committing to buy more American LNG — would likely push global commodity prices higher, with the costs falling on European consumers and Japanese ones. Europe appears in that sentence as a variable, not a participant.
The continent is too large to be ignored and too weak to be indispensable. That is not a new condition. Beijing and Washington formalizing it as the basis for bilateral management of global stability is.