MOSCOW, January 12. /TASS/. It is not a direct military confrontation but the emergence of new global formats of interaction between such power centers as the United States, China, Russia, and India that poses main threat to Europe, Nikolay Gaponenko, Associate professor at the Department of the Institute of Law and National Security of the Presidential Academy believes.

He expressed such an opinion in his report "Strategic Forecast - Europe on the Brink of Crisis: New Reality 2026-2030," which is available to TASS.

"The main geopolitical risk for European elites is not direct military confrontation, but strategic marginalization in the emerging multipolar world. Rapprochement or the creation of interaction formats between centers of power such as the US, China, Russia, and India poses existential threats to the EU: economic peripheralization, loss of regulatory influence, erosion of the transatlantic link," the economist wrote.

According to the expert, the development of new technological standards — digital ecosystems, payment systems, closed commodity loops, and settlements in national currencies — could marginalize European companies and weaken the role of the euro.

"The EU has historically used the capacity of its single market to export regulatory standards, the so-called Brussels effect, and the emergence of competing economic blocs with their own rules deprives Europe of this key instrument of soft power. Any independent strategic maneuvering by the US, for example, toward the Pacific region or a deal with China, calls into question Europe's security guarantees and forces it to urgently increase costly "strategic autonomy," the economist said.

"Such alliances will also promote a concept of world order based on the principles of state sovereignty and balance of power, which is opposed to the liberal institutional model the EU has defended for decades," Gaponenko noted.

Europe's key task is to prevent the consolidation of Eurasian, Indo-Pacific, and American continental platforms that could function without Brussels, the expert said.

"This explains the dual policy: strengthening NATO while simultaneously attempting to develop its own military-industrial and technological capabilities," he concluded.