German here, you're right. The biggest part of the problem is that historically there are only three superpowers in the EU - France, UK and Germany. The UK is gone off the rails, the French can't pick up the slack for everyone else alone and us Germans are (out of very valid historical concern)
extremely wary of pulling our weight on the international stage.
Add to this that the EU is corrosively fractured, nowhere near as coherent as the US. We're no match, hell (thanks to the Brits) the EU doesn't even have a Foreign Minister, and the effective veto power of even a super tiny nation doesn't make it any easier.
