Edit: Also the EU is and never was a hard power.
On that last bit...never is a terribly long time.
The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient government. the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.
Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?
And yet, today and for much of the past century the US is and has been neck-deep in Europe's security and political policy.
One hundred years ago, the United States was a commercial power, but no diplomatic power.
Seventy-five years ago, the United States had an army smaller than that of Portugal and retained objections to the idea of a substantial peacetime army.
How far in the future are you willing to make statements about what the nature of the EU shall be? Fifty? Fifty years from now, probably all of the people running the EU and involved in her member governments and bureaucracies will be those who are not doing so today. One hundred years? What if I told Europe of one hundred years ago of Prussian pacifism, German insistence on Middle Eastern immigration to Germany, strong Franco-German bonds or that English would be the lingua franca in Europe?