The US and Israel may have started the war in Iran, but – apart from the belligerents themselves – it is China and Europe that stand to lose the most from it. Yet while European leaders watch like rabbits caught in the headlights as energy prices shoot through the roof, China has responded to the crisis with remarkable equanimity. It is striking how self-confident Beijing is ahead of this week’s Trump-Xi summit.
That’s because China is better prepared for what I call an age of “un-order”. This is not the same as disorder, where rules exist but are broken. Un-order is a world where the rules themselves have simply ceased to matter. While European governments have been obsessed with preserving order, China has been working out how to survive chaos.
China saw this moment coming a decade and a half ago as Europeans outsourced their security to Nato, their trade rules to the World Trade Organisation, and their energy supplies to Russia and the Gulf. At the same time, Beijing was quietly stockpiling oil, food and semiconductors on a massive scale, cornering the global market in rare earths, critical minerals and the technologies of the future.
All sides are now mesmerised by the theatricality of Trump’s US, but an even bigger long-term risk is that China manages to eat Europe’s lunch, weaken its defences, deindustrialise its cities and open it up to coercion and blackmail. The scale of Europe’s exposure to Chinese dominance is staggering – and China’s industrial over-capacity and predatory exchange rates make Europe’s open markets the main target for Chinese exports.
Take the industries of the future. The fossil fuel shortfalls caused by the war in Iran are prompting many Europeans to look with renewed interest at their clean energy transition. Yet all the key elements of that transition, from batteries, electric vehicles, solar panels and – if action isn’t taken soon – wind energy supply chains, are dominated by Chinese firms.
What’s more, as Europe begins a massive rearmament spree in the face of escalating Russian threats, it finds itself dependent on Moscow’s greatest trading partner for the technologies it needs to achieve it. A startling 80% of the global drone supply chain is Chinese, while 97% of the EU’s magnesium, a key component in fighter jets, tanks and certain munitions, is supplied by China. Beijing has shown itself both willing and able to use these chokepoints when it feels it is politically expedient, as Trump learned the hard way when he was forced to back down on his tariffs in October 2025.
Some European leaders fear that taking a harder line against Beijing would mean missing out on a cornucopia of Chinese investments. But the massive technology transfers and investments that Beijing has dangled in front of the noses of the outgoing Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and Spain’s Pedro Sánchez have yet to materialise. They likely never will, unless the EU introduces tariffs that incentivise Chinese companies to build in Europe rather than exporting things from China.
The half-hearted tariffs that the EU introduced on the auto sector have resulted in a few BYD plants, but these measures are too low to make a real difference to the calculus of Chinese firms. Instead of Chinese-built factories in eastern Europe with jobs for thousands, Europe is more likely to witness rapid deindustrialisation as cheaper (and often better) Chinese products flood European markets. Fears of Baden-Württemberg, home to Mercedes and Porsche, turning into a German Detroit might be overblown, but only slightly.
To avoid a future where it is poorer and less able to defend itself, Europe needs to develop agency in a world without order. This will mean behaving more like China – and maybe giving Beijing a dose of its own medicine.
Rather than relying on external rules to defend it or thinking it could order the world, China selectively walled off its vast internal market from foreign companies. At the same time it anticipated where the world was going and positioned itself to benefit.
Europe now needs to do the same thing – the window before its manufacturers lose out to China permanently is closing rapidly. Europeans must stop their capital from going overseas to the US and use it for a massive investment drive on green technologies, AI and defence. They must build strategic critical minerals stockpiles to make Europe’s defence industry a bit more crisis-proof. Countries should make clear political commitments to buy European-made batteries and exclude Chinese wind turbines from their infrastructure.
But de-risking is not enough. Europeans must realise that they can pull levers of their own. For one, there is the EU’s famous “trade bazooka”, or anti-coercion instrument, which governments have been loth to use until recently. Momentum might finally be moving in the right direction. Clément Beaune, France’s high commissioner for strategy and planning, has recently argued that 30% across-the-board tariffs on Chinese goods ought to be on the table (this figure is well in excess of the French government’s formal position). The EU’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, known mostly as a source of irritation for Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, could also be used to limit TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba’s operations in Europe. And even more aggressive options exist: few realise that Europe could ground more than half of all Chinese commercial planes by withholding software updates for China’s Airbus fleet.
This toolkit could put Europe and China on a more equal footing, but its benefits go well beyond the EU-China relationship. It would also equip Europe to stand up to Trump if he makes another move on Greenland, turns the screws on Ukraine or threatens to cut off European access to US tech. Once European governments start trying to survive chaos rather than preserving order, they will be better able to withstand the full range of threats that emerge in our age of un-order.
