A good time for EU to pursue strategic autonomy

It was a year before I took up my assignment in Brussels when then newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron spoke passionately about the European Union's strategic autonomy in a speech at Sorbonne University in 2017.

In the past seven years, I have heard various EU leaders using words to assert a new identity for the bloc and to rouse public sentiment, but the concept has largely remained empty rhetoric.

The reasons are simple: The US exerts its influence in every field in Europe, be it security, the economy, news, universities and/or think tanks. Europe's decades of excessive dependence on the US, especially for defense, has become a habit that is hard to break.