“Europe is facing up to another seismic change in the way the global economy works. We may be approaching a shift in the international order – one increasingly defined by power, whether economic, technological or military,” she said.
Declaring a new “era of geoeconomics”, von der Leyen described unnamed powers trying to “create chokeholds on countries and industries, to exert control and impose coercion on others”.
“Europe cannot do things the same way any more,” she told the Berlin Global Dialogue. “We learned this lesson painfully with energy. We will not repeat it with critical materials … It is time to speed up and take the action that is needed.”
European independence has been a recurring motif in leaders’ speeches since US President Donald Trump threatened to tear away the American security blanket that protects much of Europe and to turn digital and technological dependencies against it, forcing Brussels to change its own laws.
