> The EU should do what serves its interests best and that is not as hard a stance on China as the US would like. This might be unpopular, but I think you are

> The EU should do what serves its interests best and that is not as hard a stance on China as the US would like. This might be unpopular, but I think you are right. The EU must not be too aligned with the US, lest it gets dragged in the next Iraq. And, to be fair, it is valuable for the US to have an external point of view they can still more or less trust, but that can still be critical. You need friends to tell you when you’re doing a stupid mistake. At the same time, the interests of the US and the EU converge very often and unfriendly relations would be counter-productive. It’s also useful to be able to play good cop/bad cop, with one partner being more accommodating like during the negotiations of the Iran nuclear deal (which failed in the end for unrelated reasons, but I believe we would have avoided a lot of grief regarding drones in Ukraine if we’d have kept the Iranian government on board).