(CN) — Europe finds itself at a highly disorienting historical moment: No longer the center of world geopolitics and adrift in a world increasingly defined by a conflict between the United States and China.
In this clash, the central stage is far from Europe's borders on the other side of the planet but its progress carries serious consequences for Europe, a major political and economic power in world affairs in its own right but reluctant to simply follow American adventurism in distant lands against China.
“The central front of geopolitics is no longer in Europe, it's now in the Pacific,” said Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, during a recent discussion. “That is a profound shock to the way Europeans think about themselves.”
This novel paradigm has left European elites utterly divided and confused about what they should do and it's given rise to an explosion in sinology studies on a continent largely untouched by Chinese history and political forces until recently.
In just a few years, a library-sized amount of material on China has been accumulated in Europe in the form of conferences, books, talks, discussion groups, documentaries, quarterlies and scholarly papers. Think tanks focus increasingly on China and disagreements over China policy are regular features inside European political circles.
At its most basic, Europeans are wrestling with a basic question: Should they consider China and its ruling Communist Party a mostly benevolent rising superpower or does it pose an existential threat to world peace and to Europe? If the first, how can Europe work with it and not antagonize its old ally, the U.S.? If the latter, how can it constrain China but also not turn it into an enemy?
In this new global Sino-American conflict, Europe is caught in the middle of a fight between its two biggest trading partners and it can seem to flounder in a world now described as dominated by the law of the jungle rather than common rules.
With Washington increasingly consumed with its strategy to counter China, American diplomacy is turning its back on Europeans and not consulting its leaders even on matters of keen importance to Europe, such as its policies in Iraq and Ukraine.
“They are basically seen as chips which can be traded off against other things,” Leonard said about how U.S. diplomats view European interests.
The relationship between Europe and President-elect Joe Biden will be a big improvement from the toxic one that evolved with President Donald Trump. Biden will be more open to discussion with the European Union on issues such as climate change and countering Russia and China. But his administration will likely carry on focusing on China and seeing EU concerns as secondary, experts say.
Unlike the U.S., a big difference for Europe is there isn't an ocean between it and China and in recent years China has rapidly begun to build rail-lines, sea links and commercial ties to Europe through its massive infrastructure project known as the Belt and Road Initiative.
It's envisioned as one of the world's biggest engineering projects ever undertaken and aims to link China to Europe and Africa through a series of ports, railroads, pipelines, airports, transnational electrical grids, fiber optic cables and economic alliances. China has built a military base in Djibouti, a small nation on the Horn of Africa, along with this scheme.
The project, announced in 2013 by Chinese President Xi Jinping, also had other motives. After the 2008 global financial collapse, the Chinese state went on a building spree to make sure its economy didn't collapse. After that, this new global project was viewed as the next step in China's development with the government saying it planned to spend $100 billion each year for a decade. That kind of spending was meant to keep its state-owned enterprises busy for years to come.