The summit looked good. Soldiers in formation, a grand temple visit, a state dinner with warm toasts. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping spent roughly 36 hours at Zhongnanhai this week performing the kind of bilateral diplomacy that shapes global economic arrangements for years. When Trump flew home Thursday, he called it a success.
For Europe, the more relevant question is: what exactly got decided, and what does it mean for us?
The clearest outcome was an agreement for China to buy 200 Boeing aircraft, a win for the American planemaker that had been largely frozen out of the Chinese market. Markets were unimpressed — Boeing shares fell on the news, with investors having anticipated a far larger order. The trade truce negotiated at last autumn’s Busan summit remains in place, with both sides signalling a desire to keep economic relations stable for now.
But on the issues that matter most to European supply chains, the week produced little concrete progress. Rare earths — the critical materials used in everything from wind turbines to defence electronics — were on the agenda but not resolved. Nothing that emerged from Beijing guarantees the flow of those materials to Europe or anywhere else. When China imposed brief export controls last October, European factories came within days of halting production. The underlying dependency was not addressed.
The energy crisis that has pushed up costs across the continent didn’t move either. China called for a ceasefire in Iran and for the Strait of Hormuz to reopen, but there is no sign the standoff is any closer to resolution.
None of this would be quite so alarming if the EU had a plan. It doesn’t. Despite years of rhetoric about strategic autonomy, Brussels lacks a coherent industrial policy or trade framework robust enough to navigate a world where Washington and Beijing make bilateral deals that set the terms everyone else lives with.
Mario Draghi put it plainly this week in Aachen, accepting the Charlemagne Prize: “For the first time in living memory, we are truly alone together.” The summit in Beijing made that observation concrete. Europe wasn’t at the table, and it has limited tools to shape what comes next.
Taiwan adds a sharper edge. Xi warned Trump directly that if the question of Taiwan is “mishandled”, it risks pushing the entire bilateral relationship into “a highly dangerous situation.” The US reportedly held back a $14 billion arms package for Taiwan ahead of the summit to keep the atmosphere constructive. How long that restraint holds — and what happens when it doesn’t — will determine whether this week’s goodwill is durable or decorative. Either way, it’s a dynamic Europe has no direct role in managing.
The Beijing summit wasn’t a crisis for Europe. It was a reminder. The global order is being negotiated between two powers that don’t need European buy-in. Every arrangement struck without EU input is another constraint that Brussels then has to work around. Changing that dynamic requires something Europe hasn’t managed yet: a trade and industrial policy with enough weight to make it a necessary partner in these conversations rather than a spectator of their outcomes.
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