Amid intensifying Sino-US competition, how do European states craft their foreign policy choices in response to U.S. strategic demands and China’s expanding economic engagement? This article argues that Europe’s geographic distance from China renders their interactions predominantly economic, making trade dependence a critical determinant of policy behavior. European countries with higher levels of dependence on Chinese trade are less willing to fully accommodate U.S. containment initiatives, producing more instances of policy conflict with Washington. Yet, concerns over China’s divide-and-rule strategies and its support for Russia simultaneously compel these states to uphold security cooperation with the United States. The result is a dual pattern of both conflict and cooperation—an empirical manifestation of hedging, in which states seek to balance economic interests vis-à-vis China with continued reliance on U.S. security guarantees. Using the number of conflict and cooperation events between European countries and China recorded in the GDELT database as the dependent variable, and trade dependence as the key explanatory variable, this study employs a negative binomial count model with country fixed effects. Evidence from 22 EU-NATO states between 2005 and 2024 strongly supports the hedging logic proposed.