Conventional wisdom holds that American material superiority leaves Europe with little room for manoeuvre. We dispute this. Raw power is not leverage. Leverage arises from asymmetric dependencies—the capacity to impose costs without incurring proportionate harm. Examining macroeconomic ties, product dependencies, financial markets, digital infrastructure, and energy, we find that Europe holds more cards than assumed: chokepoints in uranium enrichment and turbine supply, a USD 10 trillion consumer market US tech cannot abandon, and a coming LNG buyer’s market.
The US position is fragile too—Treasury demand depends on London’s hedge funds, tech valuations require European consumers, and LNG exporters need Europe’s premium prices. The United States cannot feast on global markets and retreat to its own shores at the same time.
Europe has tools to make this contradiction costly but deploying them requires action: making the Anti-Coercion Instrument credible, expanding priority procurement powers, strengthening its digital position, treating the structure of financial markets and capital flows as geopolitical issues, and building intergovernmental capacity that includes the UK.
