European strategic autonomy manifests as: (a) EU defense industrial base reaching 2.5% GDP average by 2028, (b) EU-independent AI compute infrastructure (>50 EFLOPS sovereign capacity by 2027), (c) explicit EU-China engagement channel independent of US-China dynamics?

By end of 2028, Europe has built a defense industry that spends 2.5% of GDP on weapons and military equipment—a jump from today's ~1.3%—with factories across Poland, France, and Germany running at high capacity. The EU has deployed over 50 exaFLOPS of computing power in sovereign data centers, enough to train large AI models without asking the US for chips or cloud access. European diplomats hold quarterly talks with China on trade, tech, and security that happen entirely outside the US-China conversation, with their own agenda and their own outcomes.

Europe's defense spending drifts toward 2.0–2.2% of GDP by 2028, short of the 2.5% target, as budget pressures and political disagreement on which weapons to build slow the ramp-up. Sovereign AI compute capacity peaks near 30 exaFLOPS—useful, but not enough to run Europe's own frontier models independently; European firms still license US chips and cloud services. EU-China diplomacy remains reactive, shadowing US-China moves rather than charting its own course, with no formal independent engagement channel.