The European Union has achieved something historic. Fifty-five years passed between the first and the second Peace of Thorn, which, in 1466, ratified the total defeat of the Teutonic Knights against the Polish King. It took twenty-six fateful and horrific years from the Versailles Treaty of 1919 to the Potsdam Agreement in 1945 for Germany to forfeit its right to self-determination.

Some twenty-one years passed between the First and Second Opium War, which the European colonial powers fought in the nineteenth century to enforce the most brutal trading conditions on their de facto Chinese colony. Today it has taken the European Commission merely nine months to declare its own unconditional surrender twice. In this case, it didn’t even require open warfare.

The first declaration of surrender was in unison with the United States. When capitalist states on both sides of the North Atlantic saw it necessary to introduce protectionist measures to block Chinese competitors from entering their respective domestic markets for electric vehicles (as well as solar panels and other green technologies), this was an obvious sign.