US, UK doing everything possible to sabotage China-EU ties

Just a day after Chinese President Xi Jinping commenced his official trip to Europe and met with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, a report appeared on Britain's Conservative-aligned broadcaster Sky News proclaiming that China had engaged in a hack of the Ministry of Defense. Without offering any evidence, the report stated that Beijing had compromised the data of British soldiers and employees.

Not surprisingly, the leaked report came ahead of a British parliamentary briefing scheduled for the following day by the deputy prime minister, "coincidentally timed" and thus subsequently seized upon by the usual China hawks to proclaim this is in fact why China cannot be engaged with.

There are no coincidences in politics, none, not least here. Closely aligned to the United States through the Five Eyes network, the United Kingdom serves a fundamental role in acting as a transatlantic check on continental Europe in order to project American foreign policy goals and work to subvert the influence of rival powers on the continent, namely Russia and China.

To this end, the UK actively "sabotages" engagement between Europe and either of these countries, creating uncomfortable political scenarios which effectively "tie the hands" of their leaders and thus allow Washington to continue to drive the strategic paradigm.

Scenario One: Wrecking the China-EU Comprehensive Treaty

When China and the European Union agreed to the China-EU Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI), it was the last day of 2020. The then Trump administration, which had undermined America's ties with Europe, was departing and Joe Biden, who would pursue a foreign policy of resurgent transatlanticism, was preparing to take office.

The fact that the EU had agreed a deal with China to offer exclusive market access threatened to hammer US strategy dividing the West, thus the CAI had to be stopped at all costs. To this end, the UK and the US worked together to create an onslaught of propaganda pertaining to the Uygurs in northwest China's Xinjiang autonomous region to seriously provoke opposition to Beijing in Europe, and as such prepare the way for a coordinated multilateral sanctions effort.

As an example in the months leading up to this, the BBC pushed non-stop Xinjiang stories. By March, the coordinated sanctions arrived, with the EU joining in, China responded by blacklisting hostile MEPs, the European Parliament refused to ratify the CAI and that was that.

Now, Ursula von der Leyden has effectively discarded the CAI and keeps picking spats with Beijing over "unfair trade practices" as if the treaty never happened to begin with. The US and UK of course soon succeeded in roping in Russia further by weaponizing the conflict in Ukraine to their own strategic goals, as we will see below.

Scenario Two: Blocking peace in Ukraine

When the Russia-Ukraine conflict started at the beginning of 2022, there was an immediate push for peace in the hope that the war could be ended quickly, and Ukraine agreed to make some concessions. These talks took place in Istanbul, Turkey.

It is now widely acknowledged that the US and the UK, seeking a prolonged war with Moscow, sabotaged the talks, and told Ukraine that they would back it to the point that it would be able to win zero-sum on the battlefield, and therefore not have to make concessions to Russia.

Thus in April after Russia withdrew from the Kyiv area, Ukraine snubbed peace and began, with support of the UK media, pushing the "Bucha massacre" narrative in the bid to legitimize support for continuing the war, with Western rhetoric shifting accordingly from demanding Russia to "stop" to "it will be answered on the battlefield."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed he would liberate all territories from the occupiers, while EU leaders, who had sought peace, were undermined and sidelined in favor of this push for a prolonged war with the fantasy of militarily defeating Russia, therefore allowing the US to break up the integration between the EU and Moscow, and thus affirming its strategic clout.

A British saboteur

When you view these case studies closely, it is quite explicit that the UK is actively seeking to undermine Europe on behalf of the US, especially when it comes to their leaders making strategically independent choices or decisions.

Essentially, Europe is to be "locked" into the transatlantic paradigm by being forced into situations whereby it has to confront Russia and China, as opposed to engaging with them, thus maintaining its strategic direction.

On an economic level, these outcomes have in fact been disastrous for the EU and its economy, leading to results which wholly benefit the US. Worse still, since 2022, von der Leyden has become an active accomplice in this effort. Now, with the Sky News "leaks," we're seeing it again from London. The two countries, along with von der Leyden, will do everything they can to stop improvements in the EU-China relationship.

(The author, a postgraduate student of Chinese studies at Oxford University, is an English analyst on international relations. The views are his own.)