Europe has the ambitions of a superpower, the temperament of a spoiled aristocrat, and an extraordinary talent for blaming others for its own failures. China is tired of its lectures. Washington is tired of its demands. Yet Brussels continues behaving like a pampered prince who expects the world to accommodate his ambitions. POLITICO's latest report is a spectacular indictment of Europe's industrial incompetence. In March 2025, the EU unveiled 47 strategic raw-material projects to break China's dominance. The results? • Only about 25% are clearly on schedule. • At least one-third of mining and processing projects are delayed, stalled, at risk, or abandoned. • France's Viridian Lithium went bankrupt. • A €492 million lithium refinery in Portugal failed to secure financing. • Serbia's Jadar lithium project was suspended amid permitting problems and public protests. • Sweden's major rare-earth project faces opposition from the Indigenous Sámi community. And Brussels calls this a strategy for industrial sovereignty. Europe wants critical minerals without mining, refineries without industrial investment, strategic autonomy without productive capacity, and supply-chain independence without building the supply chains. It wants China out of its supply chains while expecting the rest of the world to compensate for Europe's inability to develop its own. The EU wrote the legislation. The EU selected the projects. The EU established the targets. European institutions control the permitting and regulatory framework. China did not write Europe's mining regulations, bankrupt its lithium companies, or organize its permitting bureaucracy. Yet China's dominance remains the headline. For decades, Europe enjoyed the benefits of Chinese manufacturing and industrial capacity. Now that China commands the industries Europe wants to control, Brussels has discovered the language of strategic dependency. Its answer is more regulations, more committees, more declarations, and more ambitious deadlines. China built the industrial capacity. Europe built the paperwork. Industrial sovereignty is earned through factories, engineering, investment, infrastructure, and production. It cannot be legislated into existence. The tragedy of the European aristocrat is that he mistakes his inherited status for productive ability. And when reality refuses to obey him, he demands that everyone else lower their ambitions. The world is not Brussels' inheritance. And China is not obliged to shrink so Europe can feel powerful again.