I'm excited to see how this plays out with the current push in Europe to move a lot more heavy industry "back home" in the next 5-10 years. The US is doing the same, so it might come down to who has enough qualified personell and material (or international relations to get material) to move industry most quickly. I think having good relations to countries with material resources is going to become much more important for Europe, US etc. in the next 50 years as it becomes less viable to just plain exploit previous colonies.
I do find it interesting that when we talk about economic growth of the West vs China, we are really only talking about American growth. The rest of the EU has stagnated. Is the "global economic order" really beneficial to the west, or just to the United States? We like to talk as if everything that's good for America is also good for Europe, and things like sanctions on China and Russia should be done by everyone, but the rest of the West is not nearly as economically healthy as America. Can Europe actually afford sanctions?
It's both financing a stronger military throughout NATO and kicking Russian oil and gas out. If the EU can't afford the sanctions then the military costs will go up. One way or another there will be costs, some of the military budgets took a huge peace dividend and it will appear as excessive military spending, however some of that is just playing catch up.
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