Trump's China visit and a new global order — what the structural shift means for Europe

Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, hosts of The Rest Is Politics, tackled in a recent episode a question that has been treated superficially in much of the European debate: Donald Trump’s visit to China — the first by a US president in nearly a decade — could trigger a new global order. The phrase is large, but its reasoning is structural rather than merely topical. And precisely because it is structural, its effects reach well into the 2030s, regardless of what any single summit produces or fails to produce.

This is worth recognising at the outset. Predicting the outcome of an individual meeting is unproductive. What deserves attention is the structure within which the meeting takes place: US strategic choices are shifting — not all at once, but steadily — toward more direct bilateralism with Beijing, and away from the multilateral order on which Europe’s own security and economic policy has been built over the last 30 years.

The episode of The Rest Is Politics does not try to forecast a summit outcome. It tries to take a position on the structure — and that is the level at which the European reader should also pause.

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Source: The Rest Is Politics — How Trump’s China Trip Could Trigger A New Global Order, 13 May 2026

What the structural change is about

The US-China relationship has, over the last decade, moved from one paradigm to another so gradually that the scale of the shift is often missed. As recently as the mid-2010s the prevailing idea was that China’s growth and integration into the world economy would, over time, pull it in a direction more compatible with the West. That has since proved false, and it has been replaced by the opposite assumption: the US and China are strategic competitors whose mutual economic dependence is more a risk than a guarantor of stability.

Trump’s first term (2017–2020) launched the era of tariffs. The Biden administration (2021–2024) continued the line, adding high-tech export restrictions (chip manufacturing, hardware for machine-learning models, quantum technology). Trump’s second term now takes us to the next phase: more direct negotiation, possible tariff-deal-making, and — according to the episode’s hypothesis — also those areas where the US might be willing to concede in order to get something else in return from China. Taiwan’s security is one such “negotiable” element, raised by Campbell and Stewart as a question, not an assertion.

This is the structural shift to which Europe needs to respond. Not so much that the US would “abandon” its alliances, but that the predictability of US strategic decisions has narrowed. A European policymaker who in the 2010s could anticipate Washington’s reactions with reasonable accuracy can no longer do so with the same confidence.

What the data shows

The global change is visible in concrete flows, not only in the noise of summits. Three parallel data pictures relate directly to the episode’s themes, and all three reinforce the direction of the structural shift.

The first is Russia’s war-economic endurance and its limits. According to Western assessments, Russia’s monthly losses — killed and wounded combined — have been on the order of 30,000 soldiers per month for an extended period. This is a number large enough to strain Russia’s labour balance in a way that war-economy measures alone cannot answer. The episode’s detail that Putin has been recruiting African migrant workers for combat duties has been reported in many Western sources in recent months — and it is a structural indicator, not a one-off anecdote. A country bringing foreign labour to the front is near the limit of its labour supply.

The second is China’s role in Russia’s war economy. Beijing’s bilateral trade with Moscow has increased, but the strategic-level link is more limited than public discussion suggests. China also has its own interest in Russia not becoming an immeasurable anti-Western player that forces the US to keep its attention on Europe’s border rather than Asia. This is one reason Trump’s China visit is as much a Russia strategy as a China strategy.

The third is the narrowing of the US industrial base relative to China’s. The United States still produces top technology, but China’s industrial capacity in shipbuilding, batteries, solar panels and, increasingly, AI applications has risen to a level that Washington cannot stop with tariffs alone. This is the structure from which the US has begun to seek a new kind of bilateral arrangement — not strengthening multilateralism, but replacing it.

What this means for Europe

Europe’s position in this structure is tellingly uncertain. On the one hand Europe is the US’s closest ally, on shared values, democratic institutions and economic integration. On the other hand Europe is not at the table when the US and China together define the rules of the next decade. That is a hard but justified acknowledgment.

In practice Europe has three parallel responses to this structure, and progress on each has been uneven.

The first is **building strategic autonomy**. ReArm Europe’s 800-billion-euro frame, the order books of European defence firms, own processing of critical raw materials and the development of European language models (for example, the work of Silo AI’s successors under AMD ownership) are all moves serving the same logic. They do not mean leaving the US — they mean Europe coping also in a situation where Washington’s attention is elsewhere.

The second is the relationship with China, where Europe has tried to walk a narrow path between trade dependence and values-based opposition. Germany’s auto industry needs China, Germany’s machinery industry needs China, and at the same time the EU has put in place an anti-coercion instrument that gives it tools to respond to Chinese pressure. This is balancing that will not disappear any time soon.

The third is the defence of multilateral institutions. The WTO, the UN Security Council, climate agreements, the international court — all of these are stronger when multilateralism has defenders and weaker when great powers handle their affairs bilaterally. Europe alone is too small to maintain these institutions, but large enough to make a decisive difference in how long they remain relevant.

What it means for Finland

Finland is in a special position in all of this — but not as special as the image might suggest. We are a NATO member since 2023, which moved us out of the earlier zone of strategic uncertainty. We are an EU member participating in the building of strategic autonomy. We are on the Baltic Sea, which makes us a central actor in the security of the northern dimension.

But we also have structural dependencies whose reassessment takes years. The Finnish share of exports to China has traditionally been quite modest, but some of the key component and raw-material flows travel via Asia. Finland’s green transition investment chain partly rests on Chinese battery and panel technology. Finnish high-end expertise in quantum and AI is partly tied to global research cooperation whose rules are changing as a consequence of US-China tension.

From the 2035 perspective, Finland’s task in the coming years is twofold. First: identify the points where we are most exposed to structural shifts, and strengthen them — through alternative procurement channels, own industrial capacity or multilateral arrangements. Second: build the areas where Finland has genuine internationally relevant expertise (clean energy, quantum, cybersecurity, narrow-field industrial automation) so they can be part of Europe’s answer to the new order, not merely a dependency under it.

Looking ahead

Shifts in the global order do not come from summits. They come from the hundred decisions taken between summits — and more importantly, from decisions taken before summits have even been planned. The real significance of Trump’s China visit will not necessarily appear in its communiqué. It will appear in the fact that the visit is held at all — and in how Europe’s political class reacts in the weeks and months that follow.

Is this a threat or an opportunity for Europe? The answer depends on what we decide to do in the next five years. If we keep the strategic-autonomy project alive, we will weather uncertainty better. If we let it drift along with attention but without structure, in 2035 we may look back and notice that a new global order was built behind our backs.

One thing is clear: the old order will not return because we wish it. We will answer this question either actively or passively — and every passive year is the head-start of the active answerer.