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Policy Paper
May 2025

Lessons from the TTC for Europe's Foreign Economic Policy,
With and Without the U.S.

Authors
Mathieu Duchâtel
Resident Senior Fellow and Director of International Studies

Dr. Mathieu Duchâtel is a Resident Senior Fellow for Asia at Institut Montaigne, and Director of International Studies.

Joseph Dellatte
Resident Fellow - Climate, Energy and Environment

Dr. Joseph Dellatte joined Institut Montaigne’s Asia Program in 2022 as Research Fellow for Climate, Energy, and Environment. He specializes in international climate policy and global climate governance, ETS linkage, and political barriers to carbon pricing development in the Northeast Asian region.

François Godement
Special Advisor and Resident Senior Fellow - U.S. and Asia

François Godement is Institut Montaigne’s Special Advisor and Resident Senior Fellow – Asia and America. He was also a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. and, until the summer of 2024, an external consultant for the Policy Planning Staff of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs. He was the Director of ECFR’s Asia & China Program and a Senior Policy Fellow before leaving in December 2018.

Europe’s economic security is under mounting pressure from the rise of techno-nationalism, the fragmentation of global trade, and the weaponization of critical raw materials.

As the EU navigates the strategic rivalry between the United States and China, transatlantic coordination can no longer be taken for granted. This complicates the development of a coherent European foreign economic policy, and as a result reinforces the urgency of self-strengthening and diversifying partnerships.

Once launched as a promising vehicle for transatlantic coordination, the EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council (TTC) had the ambition to provide a structure for a shared economic and technological agenda and to forge common ground on the China challenge. Today, with the TTC effectively dormant and many questions unresolved regarding the future EU policy of the United States, the limits of this format are obvious.

This note takes stock of what the TTC achieved, where it underdelivered, and—crucially—what lessons it offers as Europe seeks to build an effective economic foreign policy. Far from discarding the TTC experience or the possibility of transatlantic coordinated action in the future, this paper underlines how the TTC’s most effective elements should be integrated into a diversified European foreign economic policy.

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