At the World LNG Summit in Istanbul, traders, producers and utility executives were striking new deals against a backdrop of something Europe hasn’t felt in its gas market for several winters: cautious confidence.

After a brutal start to 2025, when storage levels were low and memories of the 2022 energy crisis still raw, the prevailing view now is that Europe should scrape through this winter without a repeat of the panic, thanks above all to a powerful surge in liquefied natural gas imports, led by the United States.

Brussels is trying to harden the EU’s economic backbone before it gets crushed between Washington and Beijing. The new plan the European Commission just unveiled is less about free trade in the old sense and much more about survival in a weaponised global economy.

At the core of the proposal is the creation of an “economic security hub” inside the EU system, meant to act as a nerve centre linking policymakers, regulators and companies. The goal is to spot risks early, coordinate responses and help firms navigate an environment where tariffs, export controls and sanctions are now routine tools of statecraft.

China’s latest build-out of giant petrochemical complexes is tipping an already fragile global market into a more dangerous phase of structural oversupply and it’s doing so in a way that hits Europe and other high-cost producers right where they’re weakest.

Over the past decade, Beijing has rolled out seven huge integrated petrochemical hubs, pushing China past the United States to become the world’s largest producer of ethylene and polyethylene, the basic building blocks for plastics, synthetic rubber and fibers.