Strategic blueprints, scenario analyses, policy briefs, and op-eds published continuously by our resident fellows and external contributors. Search the library, filter by format, or browse by topic. All papers are open-access; subscribers to The Long View receive embargoed previews.
China’s subsidised industrial overcapacity is weakening Europe’s strategic sectors, from chemicals to clean tech and semiconductors. Europe needs faster trade defence, lower energy costs, and a clearer industrial doctrine to protect its economic sovereignty.
The UK’s macroeconomic weakness is not just cyclical. Brexit raised trade frictions with its largest market, while energy dependence exposed households and industry to price shocks, weakening growth, investment, productivity, and real incomes.
Europe’s startup weakness is not only regulation. The deeper problem is capital scale: smaller venture markets, weaker late-stage funding, fragmented national systems, and thinner exit markets prevent European startups from scaling at US speed.
Europe’s 2025 goods surplus masked a nearly €299bn energy trade deficit. Without imported fossil fuels, the EU’s goods balance would have been far stronger. Electrification and a real single energy market are now central to Europe’s external strength, industrial competitiveness, and strategic autonomy.
The EU’s Savings and Investments Union could unlock trillions in underused household savings, deepen capital markets, lower financing costs, and help close Europe’s annual investment gap. If fully implemented, it would strengthen innovation, resilience, and competitiveness against the US and China.
Germany retains the foundations of great-power relevance, but restoring it will require a stronger industrial base, cheaper and more secure energy, deeper European capital-market integration, faster technological upgrading, and a sustained military buildup.
China’s economic weakness in 2026 is being driven by structural forces, not a short-term slowdown. A persistent real estate crisis, weak inflation, overcapacity, debt stress, and rapid aging are combining to drag on growth, confidence, and household wealth.
A “soft Frexit” would leave France inside the euro but outside the EU, exposing it to major losses in trade, investment, employment, and fiscal stability. The result would likely be weaker growth, lower real wages, higher inflation pressure, and a prolonged erosion of competitiveness.
The 2026 oil shock is benefiting Brazil by boosting crude export revenues, widening the trade surplus, supporting the real, improving the current account, and lifting fiscal receipts. As a low-cost pre-salt producer, Brazil is emerging as one of the clearest macroeconomic winners from higher oil prices.
The EU has the market size, population, and regulatory weight to become a true global superpower, but only if it mobilizes capital, secures energy sovereignty, rebuilds industrial strength, leads in technology, and acts with greater political cohesion in the decade ahead.
