Above the Competition

CONTEXT

The international order is transitioning from a unipolar configuration in which a single dominant power set the terms of interstate competition to a multipolar one in which multiple actors with incompatible interests compete for structural advantage. This transition is historically the most dangerous period in any international system. Multipolarity multiplies conflict triggers, weakens deterrence architecture and creates conditions under which locally rational decisions tend to produce collectively catastrophic outcomes.

Europe's instinct is to compete within this dynamic for technological dominance, for defense capability, for strategic autonomy measured in the same terms as the major powers. This instinct misreads Europe's structural position. The more consequential role and structurally the only role Europe is positioned to play with lasting effect is to stand above the competition: as the actor that sets the rules, neutralizes critical infrastructure dependencies, and reduces the leverage points through which major power conflict is conducted. This paper sets out the structural logic of that position, the instruments through which it can be constructed, and the cost of failing to act before the window closes.

In a multipolar world, the most durable position is not dominance, it is the control of the conditions under which others compete.

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PART ONE: THE STRUCTURE OF ORDER

I. Order Is Not the Default Condition

Geopolitical order is not the natural state of international relations. It is an imposed condition the result of one actor, or a small coalition of actors, accumulating sufficient power to set the terms under which others must operate. When that power is concentrated enough, the system tends toward stability. When it fragments, the system becomes contested. The history of international order is largely the history of this cycle.

The post-1945 order, and more acutely the post-1991 unipolar moment, represented an unusual degree of concentration. A single power held military, economic, technological, and institutional dominance simultaneously. This produced a period of relative systemic stability not because conflict disappeared, but because the cost of challenging the dominant configuration was prohibitive for any single actor.

That configuration is now changing. The change is not sudden. It has been accumulating across multiple dimensions: the relative economic rise of China, the reassertion of Russian strategic ambition, the proliferation of regional powers with independent agendas, and the erosion of the institutional frameworks that managed interstate competition during the unipolar period. The result is a system in transition and transitions are historically the most dangerous periods in international order.

Order is not broken. It is being renegotiated. That process has never been clean.

II. What Drives Geopolitical Behavior

States do not behave primarily as rational actors optimizing for clearly defined interests. They behave as complex systems responding to internal pressures, historical grievances, elite incentives, domestic political constraints, and the perceived behavior of other states. Rationality exists at the margins. Structural forces tend to determine the range of outcomes.

Three forces shape geopolitical behavior with particular consistency across historical periods. The first is the security dilemma: actions taken by one state to increase its own security tend to be perceived as threatening by others, producing countermeasures that leave all parties less secure than before. The mechanism does not require bad intentions. It requires only that information is incomplete and that the costs of being wrong are asymmetric.

The second is the role of domestic legitimacy. Leaders and regimes under internal pressure are structurally incentivized to externalize that pressure through foreign policy. Nationalist mobilization, territorial claims, and military adventurism are historically consistent responses to domestic instability, rationality operating at the level of regime survival rather than systemic stability.

The third is the problem of commitment. States cannot reliably bind their future selves to current agreements. Alliances fracture under pressure. Treaties are reinterpreted when the balance of power shifts. International institutions have partially mitigated this problem during periods of hegemonic stability. In a multipolar system, that mitigation tends to weaken.

Geopolitical miscalculation is not the exception. It is what the structural conditions of interstate competition tend to produce when pressure accumulates beyond a certain threshold.

III. The Rationality Problem

Among the most consistently underweighted insights in geopolitical analysis: rationality does not scale. What holds at the individual level that sufficiently severe consequences deter action does not hold reliably at the level of collective decision-making under pressure.

The history of major power conflict is not a history of irrational actors. It is a history of actors who were rational within their own frame of reference, operating under information constraints, domestic pressures, and time horizons that made escalation locally defensible at each step. The aggregate result was catastrophic. No individual decision necessarily was.

This dynamic becomes structurally more dangerous as the stakes increase. Nuclear deterrence theory rests on the assumption that the prospect of mutual destruction is sufficient to prevent escalation. That assumption has held across the post-1945 period, but under conditions of relative systemic stability and clear bipolar architecture. As the system becomes multipolar and the number of actors with strategic capabilities increases, the conditions under which deterrence operates become more complex and the margins for miscalculation narrow.

The risk is not that actors want catastrophic outcomes. The risk is that the structural conditions of competition make catastrophic outcomes increasingly difficult to avoid.

This is a structural observation about the relationship between systemic pressure and behavioral outcomes, consistent with how interstate competition has historically resolved when the dominant order has been challenged. It is not a prediction about specific actors or timelines.

IV. Multipolarity and Its Structural Consequences

The transition to a multipolar order is not simply the addition of new major powers to an otherwise unchanged system. It is a qualitative change in the nature of the system itself. Multipolarity multiplies the number of potential conflict dyads, complicates the formation of stable coalitions, and reduces the predictability that is a precondition for effective deterrence.

Under unipolarity, the dominant power sets implicit rules and has both the incentive and the capacity to enforce them. Challengers face a clear hierarchy of costs. Under bipolarity, two dominant actors manage their competition through established channels, with sufficient shared interest in avoiding direct confrontation to produce a degree of systemic stability. Multipolarity tends to produce neither. The rules are contested. The hierarchy of costs is unclear. The shared interest in systemic stability is diffused across too many actors with too many competing agendas to function as an effective constraint.

The historical record of multipolar systems is not encouraging. The Concert of Europe managed multipolar competition with unusual success for roughly a century before collapsing under the pressure of industrialization, nationalism, and alliance failure. The pre-1914 system was not populated by actors seeking catastrophe, but by actors whose rational responses to local pressures produced, in aggregate, a catastrophe none of them sought.

A multipolar world does not tend to produce more conflict because its actors are more aggressive. It tends to produce more conflict because its architecture provides fewer structural constraints on escalation.

Analytical note: The degree of instability in any multipolar system depends on the rate of power transition, the depth of economic interdependence among major powers, and the robustness of institutional frameworks for managing competition. These factors affect timeline and severity but do not fundamentally alter the structural logic described.

V. The New Dimensions of Strategic Competition

The domains of geopolitical competition have expanded beyond the traditional categories of territory, military capacity, and resource control. Two developments in particular have changed what it means to hold strategic advantage.

The first is the emergence of digital infrastructure as a primary domain of power. Control over the protocols, platforms, and data flows that underpin modern economic and social life constitutes a form of strategic leverage that did not exist a generation ago. States have recognized this explicitly. The competition for dominance in artificial intelligence, semiconductor production, cloud infrastructure, and data governance is not primarily commercial. The US CHIPS and Science Act, China's semiconductor self-sufficiency programs, and the EU AI Act each represent state-level recognition that technological infrastructure is strategic infrastructure.

The second is the weaponization of economic interdependence. The post-1945 liberal order was built on the premise that deep integration reduces the incentive for conflict. That premise retains some validity, but integration also creates dependencies that can be coerced. The exclusion of Russian banks from SWIFT following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the reach of financial infrastructure as a coercive instrument. US export controls on advanced semiconductors toward China revealed the leverage embedded in supply chain chokepoints. These are not exceptional measures. They are the emerging normal of interstate competition short of military confrontation.

Strategic competition is no longer primarily military. It is infrastructural, technological, and financial. The advantage tends to belong to whoever controls what others cannot easily replace.

VI. Resources, Data, and the New Geography of Power

For most of the modern period, geopolitical power was substantially determined by physical resources. Energy in particular structured alliance relationships, conflict patterns, and the strategic calculations of major powers. That logic has not disappeared. Europe's dependence on Russian natural gas, a vulnerability that accumulated over decades of energy policy, became a primary lever of coercion following 2022, with economic and political consequences that continue to shape European strategic choices.

The resource map is changing. The transition to electrification is shifting critical dependencies from hydrocarbons toward the minerals required for battery storage, electric motors, and grid infrastructure, lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare earth elements. The geographic concentration of these resources, and of the refining capacity to process them, is producing new dependency structures that are beginning to shape alliance formation and strategic competition.

Simultaneously, data has emerged as a strategic resource with properties unlike physical commodities. Data is non-rivalrous, its use by one actor does not deplete it for others. But its strategic value is cumulative and self-reinforcing. The actor that accumulates the most data trains the most capable models, which attract the most users, which generate the most data. Early advantages in data accumulation tend to produce durable structural leads that are not easily reversed by later entrants.

The geography of power is being redrawn. Physical resources remain relevant. But the actors who control the infrastructure through which data moves, is stored, and is processed hold a form of strategic leverage that is less visible and, in practice, more durable than traditional resource dependence.

PART TWO: EUROPE AND THE THIRD POSITION

VII. The Linear Trap

The dominant frame in European strategic discourse is competitive: how does Europe match the United States and China in artificial intelligence, semiconductor production, platform technology, and defense capability? This frame is not wrong in recognizing that strategic capacity matters. It is wrong in assuming the relevant strategy is to enter the competition on the same terms as actors who hold structural advantages Europe cannot replicate.

Competing directly with the US and China in the domains where they hold structural leads, like scale of capital, depth oft technological talent, willingness to subordinate regulatory constraint to competitive speed, is not a strategy Europe can execute at the required level within a relevant timeframe. The political architecture is too fragmented. The capital is insufficient. The timeline is too long relative to the pace of the competition.

More fundamentally, the competitive frame misreads Europe's structural position. Europe is not a smaller version of the United States or China. It is a different kind of actor with a different kind of leverage, leverage that is not military, not primarily technological, and not dependent on matching the scale of its competitors. The failure to recognize this is not a resource problem. It is a conceptual one. You do not win by playing another actor's game, and certainly not from a structurally weaker starting position.

Europe is thinking linearly in a non-linear situation. The question is not how to compete. The question is what role only Europe can play.

VIII. The Brussels Effect and Its Untapped Potential

The European Union possesses a form of structural power that is consistently underestimated, including by European institutions themselves. The Brussels Effect, the tendency of EU regulatory standards to become de facto global standards because the cost of maintaining separate product configurations for the EU market exceeds the cost of universal compliance, is, in practice, one of the most consequential sources of non-military geopolitical leverage available to any actor in the current system.

The mechanism operates through market access rather than coercion. Any entity that wishes to operate in the European market must comply with European rules. Given the scale of that market, approximately 450 million consumers with among the highest purchasing power globally, compliance is almost always preferable to exclusion. The result is that EU regulatory choices propagate globally through the decisions of firms that find it more efficient to meet the highest standard everywhere than to differentiate by jurisdiction.

This effect is observable across domains. GDPR-style privacy requirements have influenced data legislation in over 130 countries. The EU's product safety standards shape global manufacturing. The Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are setting baseline expectations for platform behavior that no major operator can afford to ignore. The EU AI Act is establishing the first comprehensive regulatory framework for artificial intelligence with extraterritorial reach. In each case, the EU is not competing for dominance, it is setting the terms under which others must operate.

The Brussels Effect is among the most consequential sources of structural power in the current international system. It is exercised reactively, defended bureaucratically, and almost never deployed as a deliberate geopolitical instrument.

What has not been attempted is the deliberate deployment of this regulatory capacity as a strategic instrument, to use theEU's standard-setting authority to shape the rules under which global digital infrastructure operates. The instrument exists. The strategy does not.

IX. Data Protection as Strategic Doctrine

The GDPR, the Schrems II ruling, and the EU's evolving data governance architecture represent the most developed framework any major actor has established for asserting jurisdiction over the cross-border movement and processing of personal data. In their current form, these instruments are understood primarily as consumer protection mechanisms, rights-based guarantees against unconstrained data extraction by commercial entities.

This reading is too narrow. Applied with strategic intentionality, data protection is a mechanism for establishing European governance authority over any institution that processes the data of European residents, regardless of where that institution is headquartered, incorporated, or where its infrastructure is located. This extraterritorial reach is not theoretical. It is already embedded in the legal architecture.

The Schrems II ruling, handed down by the Court of Justice of the EU in 2020, invalidated the EU-US Privacy Shield and established that personal data transfers to the United States require additional safeguards, because US surveillance law creates conditions under which transferred data may be accessed in ways incompatible with EU fundamental rights. The ruling did not merely affect data flows. It asserted the authority of EU courts to evaluate the adequacy of another major power's domestic legal framework as a condition of market access. That is a geopolitical act, not a consumer protection measure.

The implication extends further. Any cloud provider, AI training operation, communications platform, or financial data processor that handles the data of EU residents is operating within EU regulatory jurisdiction, regardless of its nationality. A US hyperscaler running EU citizen data through Virginia data centers is subject to EU law. A Chinese platform mediating European communications is subject to EU oversight. Properly enforced, this jurisdiction extends European governance authority into domains that physical borders and traditional sovereignty instruments cannot reach.

Data protection, understood as strategic doctrine rather than consumer law, is a mechanism for projecting European governance authority into the infrastructural layer of the global digital economy. No military capacity is required. Only the political will to enforce consistently.

The gap between this potential and the current reality is not legal. The frameworks exist and their extraterritorial logic is established. The gap is in enforcement, specifically in the political will to enforce consistently against large foreign entities whose compliance would generate friction with the governments under whose jurisdiction they primarily operate.

A European data protection doctrine, understood as a strategic instrument rather than a regulatory obligation, would position the EU not as a competitor in digital markets but as the actor that sets the conditions under which those markets can operate in the world's largest single consumer bloc. That is a structurally more durable form of power than building competing platforms. And it is available now, using instruments that already exist.

Concrete application: The EU's enforcement of GDPR against Meta (record fine of 1.2 billion euros in2023), the DMA's designation of major gatekeepers, and the AI Act's prohibition on certain AI applications demonstrate the framework's reach. What is absent is the coordination of these instruments as components of a coherent strategic posture rather than discrete regulatory actions.

X. Enforcement as the Missing Lever

The credibility of any regulatory framework depends on enforcement. A rule that is not enforced is not a rule. It is a preference. The EU's posture toward enforcement of its digital and data regulations against large foreign entities has, historically, been closer to the expression of a preference than the consistent exercise of a rule.

The reason is a collective action problem among member states. Each competes individually for the tax revenues, employment, and technological services that large US and Chinese digital firms provide. National governments dependent on these firms are resistant to enforcement actions that might prompt retaliatory measures, withdrawal of services, reduction of investment, diplomatic friction. The result is that each member state has an individual incentive to accommodate rather than enforce, even when the aggregate interest of the European system would be better served by consistent enforcement.

The 2023 GDPR fine against Meta, 1.2 billion euros, was the largest in the regulation's history. It was also the product of years of procedural delay, inter-supervisory authority friction, and political resistance that significantly eroded its deterrent effect. The DMA and DSA created centralized enforcement at the Commission level precisely to mitigate this fragmentation. Whether that structure will be exercised with the consistency necessary to establish credibility remains to be demonstrated.

Regulatory power without enforcement credibility is not power. It is a negotiating position that sophisticated counterparties learn to discount over time.

The enforcement gap is not technical. It is political. Closing it requires a deliberate institutional decision to insulate enforcement from the short-term fiscal calculations of individual member states and a willingness to absorb the diplomatic friction that consistent enforcement of European law against major foreign entities will generate. That friction is the price of credibility. Without credibility, the regulatory framework is a ceiling that sophisticated actors know they can negotiate around. A framework that is consistently not enforced is not a framework. It is an invitation to test its limits.

XI. The Case for Neutral Infrastructure

The infrastructure through which modern economic and social life operates, communications platforms, cloud computing, financial messaging systems, AI services, data storage, is currently controlled by a small number of entities identifiable as instruments of specific national interests. The dependency of populations and institutions worldwide on this infrastructure constitutes a structural vulnerability that is increasingly recognized as a geopolitical risk.

Gmail, Google Drive, and Microsoft 365 are American infrastructure, subject to US law, accessible to US intelligence under FISA and related authorities, and potentially subject to restriction or modification by US executive action. WeChat and TikTok are Chinese infrastructure, subject to Chinese law and the data access requirements it imposes on companies operating under Chinese jurisdiction. European institutions, governments, and populations that depend on these platforms are operating within a dependency structure that could, under certain conditions, be leveraged against their interests.

Europe is differently positioned than either the US or China to offer a genuine alternative: infrastructure that is not deployable as an instrument of any single nation's strategic interest. The EU's multi-member architecture, established tradition of rule-based governance, and absence of a unilateral strategic agenda provide a credibility foundation that neither Washington nor Beijing can plausibly claim. For third-party actors, states and institutions that are already uncomfortable with deep dependency on either major power, infrastructure governed by rules rather than by national interest is structurally preferable. The challenge is not positioning. It is execution.

Neutrality, in this context, is not a given. It is not conferred by geography or declared by institutional mandate. It is constructed, through governance design that demonstrably limits unilateral access, through incentive structures that make abuse structurally costly, and through a track record of consistent rule application that builds trust incrementally over time. Europe has the architecture to construct it. Whether the political will exists to do so is a separate question.

The practical path runs through two parallel tracks. The first is the accelerated institutional backing of open-source alternatives to dominant proprietary platforms in critical categories: communications, document management, cloud storage, identity verification, payment infrastructure. Open-source projects already exist in most of these categories. What they lack is the governance guarantees, long-term sustainability commitments, and institutional adoption that EU backing could provide. The second is the establishment of EU-anchored cloud and AI infrastructure that is subject to EU law, governed by EU institutions, and structurally insulated from the extraterritorial reach of non-European legal systems.

The goal is not for Europe to own the infrastructure. The goal is for no single power to own it. Infrastructure that belongs to the human collective rather than to a national interest removes a category of strategic leverage from the competition and with it, a category of potential conflict.

This is not altruism. It is strategic calculation. Every critical digital dependency that is neutralized is a potential coercion instrument that is removed. In a system where major powers are increasingly willing to weaponize their technological assets, the actor that makes weaponization structurally more difficult occupies an indispensable and defensible position.

XII. Standing Above the Competition

The strategic logic of the preceding sections converges on a single structural position: Europe's most defensible role in the emerging multipolar order is not as a competitor for dominance but as the actor that manages the conditions under which competition occurs, the rule-setter, the infrastructure provider, the governance anchor that neither major power can plausibly be.

This position is available only to an actor that is not primarily accumulating the specific forms of leverage that the US and China are accumulating, and that is not therefore perceived as a direct threat by either. Europe's relative weakness in military capacity and technological scale, typically understood as strategic disadvantages, are, under current conditions, preconditions for the credibility of this role. An actor that cannot dominate is the only actor that can plausibly claim to be governing rather than competing.

The window for claiming this position is not indefinitely open. As the competition between the major powers intensifies and the dependencies of smaller actors deepen, the space for a genuinely independent third position narrows. The time to build the institutional architecture, the regulatory credibility, and the infrastructure alternatives that would make this position real is before the competition reaches its most acute phase, not after, when the terms will have been set by others and the dependencies will have hardened.

Europe will not be given this role. It must be constructed deliberately, before the conditions that make it possible have been foreclosed by others.

The construction requires three things simultaneously: the strategic deployment of existing regulatory leverage, beginning with data protection and the Brussels Effect; the development of credible enforcement capacity to make that leverage real; and the active provision of neutral digital infrastructure that reduces the structural dependencies through which major power competition is conducted. None of these requires capabilities Europe does not have. All of them require a quality of strategic thinking that has not consistently characterized European institutional behavior: the willingness to act from a long-horizon analysis of systemic interest rather than from the short-term calculations of individual member state advantage.

The structural obstacles to this position deserve acknowledgment. EU internal fragmentation, the persistent divergence of member state interests on foreign policy, defense, and digital regulation, is the primary constraint. A third position requires coherent external projection; a union of 27 governments with veto architecture is structurally resistant to the speed and consistency that credible strategic positioning demands. Europe's continued security dependence on the United States through NATO further constrains its freedom of maneuver: asserting strategic independence while depending on US security guarantees creates a tension that adversaries will exploit. And the political risk appetite required, absorbing diplomatic friction from both Washington and Beijing simultaneously has historically not been available within European institutional culture. These are real constraints. They do not make the third position impossible. They make it harder, slower, and more dependent on a quality of political leadership that the current moment has not yet produced.

XIII. The Cost of Waiting

The case for early action is structural. Systems in transition stabilize around whatever configuration has accumulated the most institutional momentum by the time the transition completes. The actor that establishes the rules, the infrastructure, and the governance frameworks early holds an advantage that is difficult to dislodge once embedded. The actor that waits inherits a system whose terms have been set by others.

For Europe, the cost of waiting is not only strategic. A multipolar order in which major powers compete intensely, in which the infrastructure of daily life is controlled by entities with national strategic agendas, and in which no actor has established a credible framework for managing competition below the threshold of catastrophic conflict is a more dangerous environment for everyone within it. Reducing that danger is not amoral project. It is the most consequential strategic task available to an actor with the structural position and the instruments to pursue it.

The dependency structures are still being formed. The regulatory standards are still being negotiated. The infrastructure alternatives are still technically competitive. None of these conditions will hold indefinitely. As the major powers consolidate their technological leads and the dependencies of smaller actors deepen, the leverage points that Europe currently holds will become harder to exercise, not because the instruments will have weakened, but because the counterparties will have accumulated sufficient alternatives to absorb the friction of non-compliance.

The window for establishing a third position above the competition is open now. It will not remain open indefinitely. The cost of inaction is not neutrality. It is the slow foreclosure of the only role that could matter at the scale this moment requires.

Most actors in the current system are thinking about how to win. The more consequential question is whether the conditions exist for anyone to win without catastrophic cost to the system as a whole. That question requires a different kind of actor, one whose strategic horizon extends beyond the current competition and whose interest lies in the architecture of what comes after. If Europe does not construct that position deliberately and early, no other actor will. The role will not exist. And the system will settle into a configuration in which the only available outcomes are dominance, dependence, or conflict.