Panic has finally reached the corridors of power in Paris and Berlin. After decades of blind adherence to globalist free-market dogmas and green utopian fantasies, France and Germany have jointly submitted an urgent proposal to the European Commission on October 5: They ask for a fast-track, US-style “red button” trade tool designed to restrict market access within 24 hours, so as to counter Chinese economic aggression.
This sudden sense of urgency is laughable. French and German leaders now openly lament that “systemic and persistent market-distorting practices” from Beijing threaten the very survival of Europe’s industrial base. They are calling for “sector-wide anti-dumping investigations” targeting Chinese electric vehicles, chemicals and machine tools, while demanding powers to curb Europe’s critical dependence on Chinese supply chains. Under the plan, countermeasures would take effect unless a qualified majority of member states opposed them. The paper landed ahead of an EU summit in Brussels this month at which leaders are due to discuss relations with Beijing.
It seems the Franco-German axis has finally awakened to an existential reality – one that this column has repeatedly highlighted: China is not a benevolent trading partner, but a predatory superpower using massive State subsidies, currency manipulation and raw material monopolies to destroy European manufacturing.
Yet, as Paris and Berlin scramble to construct emergency economic fortifications, one fundamental question remains: Who destroyed Europe’s industrial competitiveness in the first place? The bitter irony is that the catastrophe unfolding across the Old Continent was not engineered in Beijing alone. It was actively invited by Brussels, Paris and Berlin.
For years, the European establishment systematically dismantled our industrial power. They imposed ridiculous net-zero emissions regulations and carbon taxes, closed down nuclear power plants, made an enemy out of Russia and rejected its fossil fuels, driving energy costs to historic highs. And while European manufacturers were being strangled by bureaucratic red tape and eco-decrees, Chinese State-backed conglomerates were handed unlimited access to the European single market.
As a result, German industrial giants are now cutting tens of thousands of jobs, European auto manufacturers are shutting down domestic assembly lines and critical supply chains have been completely outsourced to an authoritarian rival.
Now, with German industry in free fall and European markets flooded with heavily subsidised imports, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz want us to believe they have suddenly discovered the virtues of going tough on trade in defence of national interests. The bloc ran a goods deficit with China of about €360 billion in 2025, and the gap widened again in the first quarter of 2026. They boast about “ending European naivety”, demanding US-style Section 301 tariffs and rapid retaliation mechanisms. But this is not an assertive strategy shift. Rather, it is a desperate admission of total ideological failure.
What is more, the proposed EU “rapid-response” mechanism is inherently flawed because it relies on the very institution that created the crisis: The European Commission. Expecting Ursula von der Leyen’s greasy-spoon lot to suddenly act with speed, agility and uncompromising resolve is pure fantasy. An administrative machinery built over decades to weaken national sovereignty, enforce socialist regulatory mechanisms and open borders is fundamentally incapable of waging a ruthless economic war.
Even if Brussels manages to push the button, Beijing holds the real levers of power. From rare earths essential for European green tech and defence, to semiconductor-grade gases, China controls the critical inputs Europe needs to function. Beijing’s commerce ministry has already warned it would respond firmly to any new EU restrictions on Chinese business.
Years of eurocratic daydreaming have left the European economy so completely entangled with Chinese manufacturing that any aggressive tariff war may hit European consumers and remaining factories far harder than it will affect Beijing.
So, the Franco-German initiative is not the dawn of a sovereign Europe protecting its workforce. It is the panic of professional politicians watching the total collapse of their economic model.
Having crushed European industry with green dogmatism and globalist open-border trade policies, Brussels and its dominant capitals are now discovering that in a world governed by raw economic power, soft-power sweet-talking and late emergency buttons cannot save a dying continent.
