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You've been told Germany is de-risking from China. The delegation that flew to Beijing tells a different story — and the gap between the two is not hypocrisy. It is structural. 1. The Assumption The official position, repeated across Brussels, Berlin, and a dozen policy documents since 2023,

You've been told the single market runs on rules. The Cupra* exemption shows how fast it can shift back to deals. *High performance brand from SEAT (VW Group) 1. The Assumption The comforting story goes like this: trade law in the EU is neutral, rules-based, and predictable.

The Pivot We’re Not Making By Manfred Lueth — February 2026 The Reckoning Disguised as a Trade Fair Opening in Essen this week, E‑world 2026 marks its 25th anniversary as Europe’s leading energy trade fair. The mood feels less celebratory than diagnostic. What began in 2001 as an

Where This Story Actually Begins In the past decade, government intervention has quietly re-entered domains that were long treated as market-led: energy, semiconductors, telecoms, AI. The assumption behind this return was simple and widely shared: strategic industries can be steered through targeted constraints without destabilising the underlying business

A Wider Zoom: How the AI Story Was Supposed to Go For much of the 2020s, the emerging AI sector was shaped — technologically, economically, and narratively — by a small group of predominantly North American companies. They trained the largest models. They controlled the largest compute clusters. They attracted the largest

The Claim Under the Knife Politicians are too risk-averse to innovate. Innovators, by contrast, can simply import their problem-solving mindset into politics and do it better. The Reality Both claims confuse individual capability with role constraints. What looks like a failure of imagination is usually the result of

The $500 billion AI infrastructure boom is built on an assumption that may not survive contact with reality: that application revenue will eventually justify the investment. THE ASSUMPTION: Infinite Compute, Guaranteed Returns The belief is seductive: explosive, near-infinite demand for generative AI compute will justify a historic wave of