Is Europe really in crisis? While Zelensky’s visit to Washington with European leaders gives the EU a new, unexpected opportunity to try to stand its ground on its own interests, many are wondering whether Brussels is truly capable of emerging from the marginality to which it has been confined in the new world order.
After the counterproductive results achieved by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in the tariff negotiations with the USA, which resulted in an agreement that was clearly unbalanced in favor of the latter, doubts have effectively multiplied about the Union’s ability to cope with the unpredictability and volatility of thought exhibited on multiple occasions by Donald Trump, the president who plays God and whose willingness to contradict himself and continuously backtrack from his positions has become an essential part of his political resilience.
“The era in which we find ourselves living is marked by the advance of new imperialisms,” says the Director General of the National Association of Port Companies and Enterprises (ANCIP), Gaudenzio Parenti, to Port News. “Today, the United States and China are forging their dominance with the weapons of economic superiority, with soft power more than with territorial acquisitions, which nevertheless continue, to a small extent, to represent an important testing ground for both superpowers: think of the ideas floated by Trump to annex the Panama Canal or Greenland, think of China and the territorial challenges in the South China Sea.”
Ultimately, globalization, whose end was already hypothesized ten years ago, never died; this was recently emphasized by the CEO of Maersk, Vincent Clerc, referring to the enormous success of Chinese companies, which continue to gain market share on the global stage.
“The tariff policy has simply made trade relations between the USA and China more volatile, but it has not curbed the latter’s total exports, which in the second quarter of the year increased by 11% on an annual basis, reaching a record figure of 856 billion dollars, thus offsetting the 24% drop in exports to the USA,” observes the expert Roman manager, for whom “recent events teach us once again that the market is an organizing principle, a coordination tool. It existed before capitalism, it exists outside of capitalism, it will exist after capitalism.”
A concept expressed these days in the Corriere della Sera by the director of Tiresia at the Polytechnic of Milan, Mario Calderini, which according to Parenti should become a maxim of experience for anyone operating in shipping: “tariffs have not limited the market, they have reshaped it, pushing companies to find alternative routes to traditional ones to ship their products to the final destination countries,” he says.
It is not just a cyclical dynamic but a sign of the times. “The nearshoring processes promoted by China itself are ultimately globalization’s own attempt to survive itself.
Delocalizing Chinese factories to Mexico, South America, or Vietnam has represented, and continues to represent for the Dragon empire an opportunity to continue guaranteeing itself direct access to the target markets and it is highly probable that in the near future it will still be Beijing acting as the driving force for a global market that has reduced its dependence on the United States, branching out more broadly and diversely across all other trade routes, starting for example with those to South America.
In an increasingly fragile international governance system, new challenges are demanding the attention of States and businesses. In the Mediterranean, for example, Africa is taking on an increasingly strategic role; China noticed this some time ago, so much so that it considers the Black Continent the potential linchpin for globalizing its interests.
The director general of ANCIP references a report published by Griffith University to point out that in the first half of 2025 Beijing and Chinese companies invested $30.5 billion in Africa for the construction of various types of infrastructure projects, with an overall increase of 500% compared to the $6.1 billion invested in the same period the previous year. “The numbers speak for themselves and highlight China’s strategic repositioning on the international chessboard, but it must be said that Russia and Turkey have also strengthened trade exchanges with African countries over the years.”
Europe, on the other hand, has stood by watching: “Apart from the latest report on the role of Regions and municipalities for the implementation of a strategy for Africa, approved last year by the European Committee of the Regions, no concrete action plans are in sight for a real strategic integration between European and African countries,” declares Parenti. “From this point of view, I cannot help but share the opinions of Professor Maurizio Maresca, who in Port News has stigmatized the acute crisis situation in which the EU has been mired for some time (read the interview here).”
For the manager, the economist Lucrezia Reichlin is right when she states in the Corriere della Sera that the EU’s crisis is not only financial but geopolitical, and also institutional. “The hybrid form of federalism that characterizes it today has evident limits, and we see this also in how political, commercial, and military relations in the Mediterranean have been managed to date,” he states, emphasizing that “the EU has fallen victim to its own structural limitations and has not managed to build over time a common level playing field among the European ports facing the Mare Nostrum and those on the southern shore.
Also the Global Gateway, established in 2021 to promote investments in global connectivity, has not yet identified clear priorities or well-defined beneficiary regions.
The Director General of the National Association of Port Companies and Enterprises denounces the uncontrollable propensity of Brussels technocrats to want to harm themselves; he cites as an example the “illogical and self-harming” rule on the ETS applied to shipping (“a mechanism for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that disadvantages the ports of the European Union, and specifically the Mediterranean ones, compared to non-EU ports, especially North African ones”) but also points the finger at State aid rules “which by now limit the capacity of member countries to invest in the development of their own companies and their own strategic assets, thus creating significant competitive disadvantages compared to Chinese, Singaporean, and South Korean multinationals, which thanks to the dynamism of their respective states have managed to overturn the shares of many production markets in a few years and strengthen their presence in Europe and the World”.
The last example examined for the analysis of European Tafazzism, the dispute between the Commission and Italy on the taxation of Italian ports “unjustly accused by the EU of requesting a favorable regime compared to the Northern European ports, whose port authorities are joint-stock companies that operate as economic activities and provide port services for remuneration”.
However, if in the interview given to Port News Maresca believes that the solution to the entirely European crisis must be found outside the borders of Europe, through the definition of new neighborhood policies that allow the countries of the Mare Nostrum to sit around a table and develop a common strategy on Mediterranean integration, Parenti remains convinced that the EU must find within itself the necessary drive to survive in the international context: “It is necessary to scrap the harmful rules and modify the internal rules of engagement which to date have disadvantaged the Mediterranean countries to the detriment of those of Northern Europe,” he says. “The EU needs to equip itself with new and dynamic regulatory tools also to confront non-EU countries on an equal footing, as in the case of taxation – he adds – certainly we must prevent Europe from continuing to follow illogical strategies implemented by technocrats who have no contact with reality and the geopolitical context, with socio-economic repercussions that we are experiencing”.
As for Italy, one of the open issues remains that of the operational viability of the Port System Authorities, which are now called upon to take on an entrepreneurial role and not just a regulatory one: “As rightly pointed out by Zeno D’Agostino and Pasqualino Monti on more than one occasion, the Golden Power alone cannot allow the State to fully exercise its role of public guidance; state-owned companies have been investing in Europe for some time – Cosco did so with the Tollerort terminal in Hamburg, for example PSA International did so in Genoa – therefore, I hope that with the new reform the State can strengthen both its role as a regulator of the internal market and that of investment in other markets, to be favored through a new, possible public company”.
