The Structural Limits of Europe’s Economic Statecraft SNIP: Europe’s geoeconomic predicament cannot be resolved within the existing architecture of defensive legalism or entrenched infrastructural dependence. So long as the continent’s financial lifelines run through American clearing rails, its foreign‑policy autonomy will remain structurally contingent on the risk calculations of private corporations and the enforcement priorities of the U.S. Treasury. The limits of Europe’s current posture are not conceptual but infrastructural: sovereignty cannot be asserted through legal instruments when the operational foundations of economic statecraft lie outside European jurisdiction. If Europe continues its present trajectory, reaffirming political autonomy while outsourcing financial viability, it will enter a decade in which its strategic choices are not simply constrained but effectively predetermined. In a world where Washington’s chokepoint power intensifies, and non-Western financial architectures expand, Europe risks becoming the only major actor unable to convert economic scale into geopolitical agency. The continent will find itself navigating a global order shaped by enforcement logics it cannot control and network infrastructures it cannot replace. The path to genuine autonomie stratégique is clear but politically formidable. A fully integrated Capital Markets Union, a jointly backed Eurozone safe asset capable of rivalling U.S. Treasuries, and regulatory mechanisms that insulate corporate risk appetite from extraterritorial coercion are not optional reforms; they are the minimum structural conditions for sovereignty. Europe knows what autonomy requires; the unresolved question is whether it is willing to bear the fiscal, ideological, and political costs of constructing it. The greater danger is not dependency itself but the persistent misdiagnosis of its origins. Europe continues to treat autonomy as a diplomatic project, even though its constraints are fundamentally infrastructural. Until the continent confronts the architecture of its dependence, it will keep mistaking legal sovereignty for operational control and political declarations for power. In the emerging geoeconomic order, power belongs to those who control the rails. Europe must decide whether it intends to build its own rails or reconcile itself to a world in which it exercises sovereignty elsewhere.