Europe just crossed a massive red line for China: this is more provocative a move that even the US themselves EVER dared do. It never happened before. Which makes this move frankly incomprehensible: why would Europe cross a line that even the US - even when it was at the peak of its power - always considered it couldn't afford to cross? All the more for an issue where Europe has no role, and when Europe is far more dependent on Chinese trade than the US? There's nothing to gain here for Europe, and a lot to lose: this move is purely destructive. There's only one precedent I can think of: in 1995 when ROC president Lee Teng-hui spoke at Cornell University (his alma mater). This was framed as a PRIVATE visit (he spoke at a university, not Congress), and it was done at a time when China was orders of magnitude less powerful (and the US immensely more powerful relative to China), but it still sparked the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. And, to boot, the US never repeated the experiment - Washington learned that even this lesser provocation wasn't worth the cost. In fact, nowadays the U.S. doesn't so much as allows Taiwanese officials to even transit via the U.S.: earlier this year the Trump administration blocked President Lai from merely transiting U.S. soil on his way to Latin America, forcing him to cancel his trip altogether (responsiblestatecraft.org/tr…). Yet Europe - with a fraction of America's leverage - just hosted Taiwan's VP at its Parliament. Pure madness. So why would they do that? One can only speculate. First of all this move was organized by IPAC, the so-called "Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China", a global grouping of legislators whose sole raison d'être is to escalate confrontation with China and perform anti-China theatrical gestures. Important context, IPAC was co-founded by Marco Rubio - now U.S. Secretary of State - who served as its inaugural U.S. Co-Chair. So there's a likely scenario where this move was done at the behest of Washington in order to poison relations between China and the U.S., especially at a moment when the EU is apparently discussing with China a Free-Trade Agreement (FTA) similar in spirit to the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) (x.com/fbermingham/status/198…), another EU-China FTA to which the U.S. was vehemently opposed and which they managed to torpedo. How did the US torpedo the CAI? This is where it gets interesting: with an extremely similar move. In March 2021 they got EU parliamentarians to impose sanctions on four Chinese officials (politico.eu/article/eu-impos…) because they were linked to the so-called "Uyghur genocide", knowing full well that this would invite Chinese retaliation. And sure enough China responded by sanctioning EU officials, which immediately led all the Atlanticist MPs in the EU to scream bloody murder: "how could they do this to us? This unprovoked aggression is absolutely unacceptable! We cannot possibly do a trade deal under those conditions! Bla, bla, bla". The CAI was dead. More details on the CAI move here: x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1… So that could be a scenario: Washington orchestrated this provocation through IPAC to trigger Chinese retaliation, giving Atlanticist MEPs the pretext to kill EU-China trade talks - all as a way to ensure Europe remains America's economic chasse gardée, limiting EU-China economic integration. The exact same playbook that worked to destroy the CAI in 2021. Under this scenario, ironically the U.S. doesn't want to anger China themselves because they want maximum room to maneuver in their own bilateral relationship. A strategic flexibility they don't want Europe to have. There could also, interestingly, be an exact opposite reading: European Atlanticists deliberately sabotaging the warming US-China relationship and Trump's "G2" overtures. Host Taiwan's VP → provoke Chinese retaliation → weaponize the crisis to force US escalation → make Trump-Xi accommodation politically impossible. The nightmare scenario for European Atlanticists is a US-China grand bargain that marginalizes Europe entirely, so they engineer provocations that make such a deal untenable. Though, let's be clear, this assumes a level of strategic sophistication that seems beyond the current crop of European parliamentarians. But who knows... Or it could also very well be simpler than all that: Atlanticist MEPs acting out of pure ideological conviction - European politicians who are so detached from the material realities of power, so marinated in transatlantic think tank talking points, and frankly so irresponsible, that they'll sacrifice European interests on the altar of their own moral self-image - treating great power relations as an opportunity for virtue signaling, consequences be damned. Or it could be a mix of the above, or something else entirely. One thing is sure though: this undoubtedly WILL further poison EU-China relations, which IS against EU interests because Europe's optimal strategic position is to maintain better relations with both Washington and Beijing than they have with each other. That's where Europe's leverage lies - as the balancer, the one both sides need to court. That's how you extract concessions and preserve options. This move destroys this optionality and shows that Europe - through manipulation, ideology, or sheer strategic incompetence - continues waging a war of anti-independence against itself.