Europe, China, and the Making of a Multipolar Order

By Jianyong Yue - 15 December 2025

Europe, China, and the Making of a Multipolar Order

This essay argues that America’s strategic retrenchment, made explicit in NSS-2025, has opened a narrow but significant window in which Europe and China—if they act with foresight—could help anchor elements of a more stable multipolar liberal order.

A string of recent developments—some diplomatic, some strategic, some buried in bureaucratic language—suggests that the international system is entering a rare moment of structural recalibration. The United States has opened exploratory channels with Russia on a potential ceasefire framework for Ukraine. French President Emmanuel Macron has sought to reset Europe’s increasingly brittle relationship with China. And Washington’s National Security Strategy 2025 (NSS-2025) has redirected U.S. grand strategy toward the Western Hemisphere while setting a firm 2027 deadline for what it calls a “Europe-led NATO.”

At the November APEC summit, President Donald Trump made an even sharper declaration by identifying China as a “peer rival”—the first time since the Cold War that the United States has acknowledged another state as an equal structural competitor. Taken individually, these developments may appear tactical. Taken together, they signal the loosening of the post–Cold War unipolar order and the emergence of a system shaped by dispersed power, diverging priorities within the West, and renewed great-power bargaining.

America’s Hemispheric Turn and the Drift Toward Multipolarity

Washington’s strategic shift is the most consequential driver of this transition. Constrained by fiscal pressures, domestic polarization, and simultaneous regional crises, the United States is moving from an all-purpose global leadership posture to a more selective engagement strategy centered on the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific. This is not a return to interwar isolationism but a form of “flexible realism”: a willingness to retain global reach while insisting that allies assume far greater responsibilities.

NSS-2025 makes this adjustment explicit. Its European chapter warns of demographic stagnation, political fragmentation, and what it terms “civilizational erasure”—a phrase that would have been inconceivable in a U.S. national security document a decade ago. It reaffirms Europe’s importance but signals a decisive shift: the United States will no longer serve as Europe’s blanket security guarantor. Washington’s priority is to prevent any rival from dominating the continent while pressing Europeans to rearm and provide for their own defense.

Some analysts detect an even sharper implication. Historian Phillips P. O’Brien argues that the Trump administration views a strategically autonomous Europe as a greater long-term challenge to American primacy than either China or Russia. Yet this is a distant concern. In the near term, the logic is straightforward: a Europe capable of managing its own security frees U.S. resources for the Indo-Pacific—the administration’s first-order priority. This calculation underpins Washington’s insistence on a “Europe-led NATO.”

Commentary from Washington reinforces this trend. Rebecca Lissner notes that the first “MAGA” national security strategy casts the United States as an “illiberal superpower”—a shift that should prompt democratic allies, especially in Europe, to reconsider the stability of their own dependencies.

The structural consequences are already visible. The Ukraine war has forced Europe to confront its long-deferred defense deficits. Budgets are rising. Industrial bases are being retooled. Debates over strategic autonomy—formerly confined to policy circles—now occupy electoral politics. Intentional or not, the United States is midwifing the emergence of a more capable, more self-aware European pole—one well suited to an increasingly multipolar world.

For China, this reconfiguration creates both constraints and opportunities. A United States focused on the Indo-Pacific and a Europe upgrading its strategic capacity yields two increasingly independent Western poles. Yet this very decentralization opens political space for Beijing to engage Europe more directly and less through Washington’s filter.

The emerging order is neither a reversion to Cold War–style bipolarity nor a slide into fragmentation. It is a fluid multipolarity—still formative, but increasingly visible as power disperses across multiple centers. For clarity, the term “multipolarity” here refers to the structural distribution of hard power, rather than “multiplexity,” a broader concept that encompasses normative and institutional diversification.

Europe and China: Structural Compatibility Beneath Political Friction

The central question is whether Europe and China—two actors with divergent political systems and rising suspicion—possess sufficient structural compatibility to cooperate in this new environment.

Europe’s strategic psychology today echoes earlier eras. Before 1914, elites feared being overtaken by American dynamism and Russian capacity. After 1945, integration and Atlantic partnership anchored stability. But the pressures of the 2020s—war on the continent, energy insecurity, technological vulnerability, and the widening gap between Europe’s geopolitical ambitions and its military means—have revived anxieties about dependency.

Washington’s demand that Europe assume serious defense responsibilities has served as a profound wake-up call. The Ukraine war exposed the limits of Europe’s “postmodern” security model. Economic weight and regulatory influence cannot substitute for credible hard power. Even in transatlantic relations—rooted in shared values—peace ultimately rests on a balance of capabilities.

China’s strategic logic differs markedly from both Europe and traditional great-power trajectories. Beijing’s global presence has expanded, but its primary pressures remain internal: market integration, regional disparities, social governance, and industrial transformation. As a continental-sized economy, China can pursue modernization largely through domestic reform. Its external demands—access to energy, resilient supply chains, stable markets—reflect the imperatives of scale more than territorial ambition.

Portrayals of China as a “restless empire” misinterpret these incentives. Much of China’s recent assertiveness has been reactive, shaped by intensified external pressure and cyclical domestic politics rather than by a coherent revisionist ideology. Even China’s more strident episodes—from the late-1960s diplomatic militancy during the Cultural Revolution to the recent “wolf warrior” impulses—have proven transient. Over time, Chinese foreign policy has tended to revert to pragmatic equilibrium.

Seen in this light, China is fundamentally a stability-seeking power rather than a traditional revisionist state. It requires predictable global conditions, open markets, and friction-reduced access to international networks. Europe, despite its economic-security concerns, seeks a similarly stable and rules-enabled environment.

Crucially, Europe and China lack deep structural antagonisms—a rarity among major powers today:

no territorial disputes,
no competing spheres of influence,
no incompatible security doctrines.

Ideology still shapes political attitudes, but it has become less determinative in practice. The severity of the Ukraine crisis, combined with Washington’s own shift toward “flexible realism,” has made European governments more inclined to evaluate China through concrete security interests. Nowhere is this clearer than in their hope that Beijing might play a role in stabilizing the Ukraine conflict.

Beneath political friction, therefore, lies a degree of strategic complementarity that is becoming more—not less—relevant as multipolarity consolidates.

Ukraine: A Testing Ground for a Sino-European Modus Vivendi

The war in Ukraine provides the earliest and most realistic test of whether Europe and China can convert structural compatibility into practical cooperation. The logic is not moral alignment but strategic necessity.

Europe faces an expanding security vacuum created by U.S. reprioritization, an open-ended conflict on its borders, and mounting economic and social fatigue. Russia oscillates between negotiation and escalation. Global markets remain vulnerable to disruptions in energy, food, and critical minerals.

NSS-2025 formalizes America’s shift. It removes Russia from the category of “direct threats,” calls for renewed strategic-stability talks with Moscow, and elevates China to peer-rival status. The message is clear: Washington seeks to wind down its European commitments to free resources for the Indo-Pacific.

This configuration places China in a distinctive diplomatic position. Beijing retains channels to Moscow that Western capitals no longer possess, while Europe does not view China as an existential enemy. If China can help stabilize the conflict—even short of brokering a settlement—it could reshape European perceptions in significant ways.

A realistic framework need not pursue dramatic breakthroughs. It could aim to:

freeze hostilities along a line close to pre-February-2022 positions,
establish internationally supervised monitoring mechanisms,
defer sovereignty disputes to long-term negotiations,
and integrate Ukrainian security guarantees into a broader European architecture.

Europe would lead the political process; China’s role would be to ensure Russian seriousness and discourage escalation. Beijing’s leverage is real: Russia’s post-2022 economic reorientation has created deep dependencies on Chinese markets, financing, and supply chains.

If China helps facilitate a credible ceasefire—quietly and without triumphalism—it would alter Europe’s strategic perception of Beijing. China would appear less as a systemic rival and more as a pragmatic stabilizer. This would not align Europe with China against the United States, but it would complicate efforts to build a broad anti-China coalition and give Europe greater strategic room.

More importantly, it could lay the groundwork for a structured, interest-based Sino-European relationship—modest in ambition, but meaningful in a world drifting toward competitive multipolarity.

Toward a Multipolar Liberal Order

Despite America’s retrenchment, most states still prefer the core features of a liberal international order: open markets, rules-based dispute resolution, institutional transparency, and restraint among major powers. But no single country today can sustain such an order alone.

The most plausible future is a multipolar liberal order—open but not hegemonic; rules-enabled but not idealized; supported collectively by the United States, Europe, China, Japan, and pivotal regional actors.

For such an arrangement to function:

Europe must complete its military modernization and become a credible pillar of global stability.
China must continue its domestic economic transition—market integration, reduced regional inequality, industrial upgrading—so it remains a source of global resilience.

Sino-European cooperation is not about balancing the United States. It is about sustaining workable openness at a moment when global institutions risk hollowing out. Washington remains indispensable to global order. But Europe and China can help ensure that no single rivalry—especially in the Indo-Pacific—derails the broader system.

If they can align even modestly on economic stability, climate governance, health security, and conflict mitigation, Europe and China can help steady the foundations of global order.

Seizing the Moment

As 2025 draws to a close, the international system stands at a structural inflection point. The United States is redefining its global role. Europe is rearming and rediscovering its strategic voice. Russia’s war in Ukraine continues without resolution. The world economy remains fragile.

For China, this constellation offers a rare chance to shape the emerging order through constructive engagement rather than reactive maneuvering. For Europe, it is an opportunity to reduce dependence on the United States and emerge as a genuine global actor.

Cooperation between Europe and China will not remake the international system overnight. But neither should its significance be underestimated. In a moment of geopolitical uncertainty, collaboration between two major civilizational and economic centers could help anchor a more stable multipolar world.

As Richard Nixon quoted from Mao Zedong during his 1972 visit to Beijing:
“Seize the hour.”

For Europe and China alike, the hour may well be now.

Jianyong Yue is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. He previously taught Chinese politics and development at King’s College London and the LSE. He is the author of China’s Rise in the Age of Globalization: Myth or Reality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Crony Comprador Capitalism: The Institutional Origins of China’s Rise and Decline (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

Photo by Bruno Thethe: