‘We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline’, said US Foreign Secretary Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference. And he added: We will ‘renew the greatest civilization in human history’. So his message is: The empire is back”!

US president Donald Trump won the elections on a promise to solve US’ domestic problems. As so many US presidents before him, he hasn’t delivered on this promise and has instead started new military adventures in far-away countries. The successful operation to kidnap the Venezuelan president has apparently given him an appetite for more. That spells danger for the rest of the world. And for the US.

The international political and economic system is under reconfiguration, and China is fundamental for this process. China has for decades been a rapidly surging economic power, but will it continue? The country faces many challenges, and there are, as always, China observers predicting doom. This is nothing new. But just because doom-sayers have been wrong up to now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are wrong again. However, they probably are.

There is no doubt that China, an increasingly competitive economic power, represents an economic challenge to the EU. However, the European leaders' discourse goes far beyond the economic challenge. Now China is described as a military threat. Among the most hawkish China-haters are EU President Ursula von der Leyen, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. It remains a mystery what they want to achieve.

The main reason that the EU, unlike China, gave in to Donald Trump’s tariff assault without a fight, is not that the EU’s trade dependency on the US is much greater than China’s, but rather that it has other priorities, first of all Ukraine; its military depends on the US; its bureaucracy is not well fit for this type of struggle; and it lacks internal coherence if it should choose to fight back. It is therefore an easy prey for a predator like Trump.