Financial Times: It is time for Europe to weaponise its chokepoints

Source: Financial Times - It is time for Europe to weaponise its checkpoints
Author: Martin Sandbu

“A group of experts called the Geostrategic Europe Taskforce last week published a report which “identifies 41 critical chokepoints where China depends on the EU for more than 80 per cent of its imports, and 67 such dependencies for the United States. These span essential inputs including insulin, pharmaceutical intermediates, medical technologies, and specialised machinery for agriculture, paper production, and industrial processing.”

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These researchers do a great service in showing Europe is better armed for geopolitical conflict than its leaders might think. Simply mapping the levers one might use is a step towards a more assertive stance. These exercises also offer a number of further lessons for European leaders.

One is the need to broaden one’s perspective from “managing partnerships to projecting power”, as Geostrategic Europe Taskforce puts it. Specifically, for the EU, this means lowering the threshold for the “anti-coercion instrument”, which permits many kinds of retaliation, to also be deployed to see off any threat before it materialises, rather than just reactively.”

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“This knowledge is welcome and necessary, but only a start. Power in the sense of having instruments of coercion is not the same as power in the sense of successfully securing one’s interests. The latter requires a willingness to make use of the former — perhaps aggressively so. That is a step Europe’s political leaders have yet to take.”