The U.S. and the European Union are still struggling to agree on specific ways to slow China’s technological rise and limit its coercive trade practices even as both have signed onto the strategic need to "de-risk” their relationships with Beijing.
Senior U.S. officials had wanted the EU to agree this week to jointly pursue a new mechanism to screen outbound investments to places like China. Instead, the two sides emerged from a high-level trade meeting in northern Sweden with a joint document that largely avoids mentioning Beijing.
"We start from exactly the same approach, which is that none of us are looking for confrontation,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a joint news conference. "None of us are looking for a cold war.”