Geopolitics
The Hollow Fortress: How Europe's Rules-Based Trade Order is Being Undermined by Its Own Virtue
The European Union has built the world's largest network of modern free trade agreements governing nearly a third of global GDP, yet this impressive edifice is buckling under a staggering and rapidly growing trade deficit with China, a strategic competitor operating on a fundamentally divergent economic model. It is a tragic farce to see Europe's multilateral virtue being hollowed out by its own institutional paralysis and a refusal to confront the reality that the Westphalian rules-based order was never designed for, and cannot contain, the rise of a civilizational state like China.
