What the EU’s Updated Economic Security Doctrine Still Lacks
The absence of any short-term “what to do” in the face of coercive threats from the US and China leaves the EU navigating without a compass.
If the EU wants to re-establish itself as a stabilising force internationally — capable of constraining the economic dominance of the US and China and promoting a bottom-up form of multilateralism — it must equip itself now with tools that give it real weight in dealing with the two superpowers, pairing economic measures with a “new doctrine of political security”
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Can the European Union recover from the recent defeats and humiliations inflicted by the United States and China in the economic and trade arenas?
To do so — and to regain a meaningful role in the international economic landscape — the EU must restore its lost credibility by demonstrating that it is willing and able to use the instruments at its disposal to reduce the strategic dependencies that threaten its economic security and undermine its sovereignty.
At the same time, it needs to articulate an alternative to the imperial-style superpower logic that shapes US and Chinese behaviour. Both operate through zero-sum frameworks: in the case of Donald Trump’s America, by openly repudiating a rules-based multilateral economic order; in the case of China, by exploiting that system opportunistically to advance its interests and geopolitical ambitions, thereby undermining its foundations.
The European Commission’s “Joint Communication on strengthening Economic Security,” published on 3 December, could have been a first step towards reversing Europe’s recent setbacks, rebuilding its credibility and loosening the strategic dependencies that make the EU vulnerable.
The analysis set out at the beginning of the Commission document is largely convincing: recent geopolitical and geoeconomic shifts put the EU’s security, public order and competitiveness at risk.
A “paradigm shift” is therefore required in Europe’s approach to economic security — one that translates into a more proactive and systematic deployment of existing instruments and, where necessary, the creation of new ones.
However, the doctrine only partially meets its stated objectives. As Ignacio García Bercero and Niclas Poitiers recently noted in a Bruegel policy brief, the EU must combine a medium-term strategy to reduce critical dependencies on both the US and China with the capacity to respond in the short term to coercive threats.
Instead, the EU doctrine focuses heavily on reducing medium-term dependencies, largely through a more assertive and targeted use of Europe’s existing toolkit. It is a strategy centred on industry and high-tech sectors, but it pays considerably less attention to financial dependencies and those linked to digital services — both of which pose immediate, high-risk threats to Europe’s economic security.
By contrast, the doctrine offers only a few cursory references to the ability to react swiftly to coercion.
The conclusion of the document emphasises that the EU’s tools must be used “strategically,” but does not explain how. A meaningful discussion of how to restore credibility to the Anti-Coercion Instrument — which was twice not activated in recent months despite conditions seemingly being met — would have been essential. So too would an analysis of chokepoints under EU jurisdiction that, if strategically leveraged, could strengthen Europe’s negotiating power.
The lack of a short-term operational plan leaves the EU navigating by sight, reacting — rather than acting proactively, as the doctrine promises — when faced with concrete threats to its economic security.
This is all the more problematic because it is naïve to think that the US and China will passively accept a reduction in Europe’s dependencies. They will react — especially if the EU appears unprepared to defend itself.
The United States can no longer be assumed to be an ally. The National Security Strategy published by the White House in recent days fully embraces — and operationalises — the positions articulated by JD Vance in his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February. It identifies the EU as an “existential adversary” and openly aims to “cultivate” nationalist forces within EU member states.
If the EU wants to re-establish itself as an international stabiliser, capable of constraining the economic overreach of the US and China while promoting a bottom-up multilateral order, it must equip itself now with the instruments needed to give it weight in its dealings with the two superpowers. Economic tools alone are insufficient: a “new doctrine of political security” must accompany them.
Timidity is no longer an option.
A version of this article originally appeared in Il Sole 24 Ore.
Moreno Bertoldi
Moreno Bertoldi is Senior Associate Research Fellow at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI).
Marco Buti
Since April 2023, Marco Buti has held the Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa Chair at the Robert Schuman Centre. Before joining the EUI, Buti was Chief of Staff of the Commissioner for the economy, Paolo Gentiloni. Between 2008 and 2019, he was Director-General for Economic and Financial Affairs at the European Commission. Moreover, he has been the Commission Finance Deputy at G7 and G20.
He is an IEP@BU fellow.
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