As the transatlantic relationship navigates profound change, Europe faces mounting pressure to define its strategic priorities. This panel examined how the EU is recalibrating its posture, the implications of digital infrastructure and financial technology, and what shifting great-power dynamics mean for US-European relations. The conversation was hosted at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in Washington DC in partnership with ENSURED and the MIT Center for International Studies.
Panelists:
- Dr. Evgeny Roshchin, Host; Director, Democratic Resilience, CEPA
- Dr. Hylke Dijkstra, Full Professor of International Security and Cooperation, Maastricht University; Project Coordinator, ENSURED
- Dr. Federica Marconi, Research Fellow, Multilateralism and Global Governance Programme, Istituto Affari Internazionali; Lead, Digitalization, ENSURED
- Dr. Mihaela Papa, Director of Research and Principal Research Scientist–BRICS Lab, Center for International Studies, MIT; Researcher, ENSURED
EU Strategic Priorities and Posture
The Union's near-term agenda centers on three priorities: defense and Ukraine, securing its immediate neighborhood, and expanding its set of international partners. Trade remains both a priority and a proven strength, with the EU-Mercosur and EU-India agreements demonstrating that the EU’s ability to close major deals. Multilateral commitments persist — climate change as a sustained pledge, the pandemic agreement as significant — though the latter's appendix negotiations have been postponed. A more critical note concerns burden-sharing: despite serious UN funding shortfalls, the EU has not moved to fill the gap. Overall, the EU is actively recalibrating its strategic posture.
Digital Sovereignty and Economic Security
With technology now a central arena of geopolitical competition, the weaponization of trade and investment has exposed three European vulnerabilities: dependence on critical inputs such as semiconductors and raw materials, reliance on non-European digital infrastructure, and exposure to technologies governed by foreign jurisdictions. In response, the EU is moving beyond its standard-setter role (the AI Act, DSA, DMA and Data Acts) toward industrial policy that protects strategic assets and builds domestic capacity, exemplified by the new Tech Sovereignty Package, which includes a proposal for the Cloud and AI Development Act. The open tension is between strategic autonomy and cooperation, particularly with the United States, which these measures have strained.
Multipolarity, BRICS, and the US-EU Divergence
Multipolarity is a deliberate, 30-year Sino-Russian doctrine — from the 1997 Yeltsin-Jiang declaration to the fuller 2026 joint statement reconfirming its key principles at a time of de-dollarization and non-Western institution building. The US and EU respond from different positions: Washington through great-power competition and containment, sanctions, and tariff warnings; Brussels manages China in the three different modalities of a partner, competitor, and systemic rival under the framework of “de-risking, not decoupling.” China and Russia have largely captured the multipolarity discourse and BRICS has bandwagoned onto it, leaving open whether the US and EU can offer an original, forward-looking vision of global order.
Cross-cutting Challenges and Open Questions
A recurring theme was that the EU's central challenge is implementing the stack of initiatives it has already adopted and ensuring coherence so that proliferating sector-specific rules don't fragment into overlapping obligations and needless complexity. The rise of "trusted partnerships" stood out as a notable reframing of how the EU approaches cooperation, even as its practical meaning for digital and technological ties remains undefined. The EU is visibly rethinking its relationships with both Washington and Beijing while attracting new partners and advancing its multilateral goals. As multilateralism continues to transform, the challenge is to develop informal diplomacy and use forums like the G20 to mitigate major power conflict and preserve bargaining space.
Photo: openDemocracy / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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