The lukewarm response from the “Global South” to sanctions and UN resolutions against the war has come as a shock to Brussels. Its new China strategy is likely to prioritise building bridges with so-called “swing states”, with a leaked internal document seen by the Post naming Brazil, Chile, Kazakhstan and Nigeria as the main targets.
The EU’s foreign service staff are currently writing a “position paper” to steer the discussion. This will be debated by foreign ministers in Stockholm next month, then kicked up to national leaders in June. Immediately after their meeting in Stockholm, the foreign ministers will meet their Indo-Pacific counterparts in the same city. One notable absentee will be China, as the Europeans look to turbo-boost outreach to countries also harbouring concerns about Beijing.
The timing is no coincidence: painfully aware of the need to court the region, Brussels was eager to secure maximum attendance on the European side and worried that officials might not fly in for a separate meeting on Asia. And in an effort to ensure the Indo-Pacific countries keep coming back, Taiwan will not be named on the agenda or in any communique, said a source familiar with the discussion.
At the same time, the EU’s trade department is devising an “economic security strategy”, also aimed at China, that will propose new trade weapons such as outbound investment screening to keep critical technology out of Beijing’s reach. The pair of policies has the potential to redraw the EU’s approach to China, even if there is no appetite to drop the 2019 designation of Beijing as a partner, rival and competitor.
Officials see de-risking as being compatible with the “triptych”. There is also a realisation that it would be difficult to agree on an alternative. “It is not about reinventing the wheel … obviously, describing China as a partner, a rival, a competitor – that’s still valid, it was very well summarised at the time,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said this week.
There are signs that the concept is already beginning to seep through into policy. In Germany, Bloomberg reported this week that the government was considering restricting exports of some chemicals used in high-end chip manufacturing to China. “De-risking is now the word in everybody’s mouth. Decoupling is not the order of the day. In terms of language and principles, there has been consensus – France and Germany are on the same page,” said Nils Schmid, foreign affairs spokesman for the Social Democrat Party that leads Berlin’s coalition government.
Some Brussels officials gleefully texted on Friday that their language had been picked up in Washington, hours after White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said: “We are for de-risking and diversifying, not decoupling.” Others, however, cautioned that the process was just beginning, and that the hard work lay ahead.
“If only policy was as simple as just saying stuff,” said one European diplomat. “Everyone agrees with the narrative. But the actual policy is genuinely hard to do.” An official involved in economic policymaking bemoaned the stringent timelines. “We can have a proposal ready for you tomorrow if you just want an announcement,” he said, implying that a substantive piece of legislation should take more time.