The new ‘transactional reality’: Europe prepares to face China on its own terms

Name: US officials accidentally share Yemen war plans with journalist in apparent security breach
Uploaded: 2025-04-01T22:00:17.000Z
Duration: 2 min 19 s
Description: US officials accidentally share Yemen war plans with journalist in apparent security breach

Trump has torched relations with the European Union, and the bloc’s new-found pragmatism is said to be defining its strategy on Beijing

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Finbarr Berminghamin Brussels

Published: 6:00am, 2 Apr 2025Updated: 9:08am, 2 Apr 2025

In March, European diplomats were left scratching their heads after being hauled in by US government officials to explain why public and private satellite operators had published images of locations in the Red Sea.

The European Union had not deemed the images sensitive – just the run-of-the-mill sort published by agencies the world over every day. But the Donald Trump administration was insisting that they endangered United States national security, according to people familiar with the affair.

After The Atlantic published its “Signal-gate” story, detailing how top US government officials had used the messaging app to plan military strikes against Houthi operatives in that region, EU officials understood why the US was making such a fuss, even if they maintained that the images were innocent in nature.

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US officials accidentally share Yemen war plans with journalist in apparent security breach

The episode is used to illustrate how cut off Europe is from official thinking in Washington. Since Trump’s return, the bloc has found itself regularly in the firing line – on the hook for tariffs, subject to the president’s expansionist territorial claims, and a target for anti-woke rhetoric from across his cabinet.

In a world where a slip of the tongue could lead to a démarche, tariffs, or worse, officials now prefer to say nothing publicly at all. One Brussels source last week described it as a “possum strategy … keep your head down and hope nobody sees you”.

This new approach has helped inform how the EU deals with other countries too, and was on full display during its trade commissioner Maros Sefcovic’s trip to China last week.

The Slovakian spent three days in Beijing, meeting Vice-Premier He Lifeng, Commerce Minister Wang Wentao and Customs Minister Sun Meijun. He gave a speech at the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, but with the exception of a few tweets, you would scarcely have known it.