Too Little to Meet the Moment

The European Commission published its long-awaited Communication  on how the EU should implement its 2023 Economic Security Strategy on December 1, after a year that saw Europe come under sustained economic pressure—most notably from Chinese restrictions on rare-earths exports and new US tariffs. Adding insult to injury, reports suggesting that Brussels’ rare-earths crisis eased only after the United States and China reached a bilateral accommodation show that Europe is increasingly on the sidelines of decisions that directly affect its prosperity. Yet, Brussels remains constrained by the very geopolitical pressures the Communication seeks to address. The result is a document that acknowledges Europe’s vulnerabilities without delivering the kind of decisive measures that would reverse the bloc’s gradual slide toward becoming a theater for great-power competition.

The new Communication identifies six high-risk areas for immediate action: reducing strategic dependencies in critical goods and services, attracting value-added inbound investment, supporting Europe’s industrial base, protecting leadership in critical technologies, preventing access to sensitive data, and shielding critical infrastructure from disruption.

To address these risks, the Commission places great emphasis on a stronger role for information-gathering and joint risk assessments, notably via the new Economic Security Information Hub, and deeper intelligence-sharing with member states and industry. This ambition is sure to butt against many European capitals’ unwillingness to share sensitive information with Brussels. The Commission still faces an uphill battle to convince them that the hub will address member states’ worries about what they see as Brussels’ inability to understand businesses’ concerns or to keep sensitive information confidential.

The Communication also emphasizes closer coordination with “trusted partners”, coordinated deployment of anti-coercion and trade-defense tools, and efforts to build reliable supply chains with like-minded economies, notably in the G7. It also promises forthcoming guidance on FDI screening, an evaluation of dual-use export controls, support for value-added inbound investment in sectors such as electric vehicles, and targeted measures to curb technology leakage, industrial espionage, and predatory foreign acquisitions.

While the Communication frames this as a paradigm shift toward a more proactive stance, the strategy relies heavily on existing instruments and introduces few genuinely new tools. Crucially, Europe continues to depend on Washington for its security and on China for critical goods, leaving it vulnerable to pressure from both sides. The vague commitments in the economic security Communication are not enough for the EU to reclaim agency in an international system increasingly shaped by others, and this failure pushes Europe ever closer to becoming merely a stage for larger powers’ maneuvering.

The views expressed herein are those solely of the author(s). GMF as an institution does not take positions.