The European Union has developed a series of “strategic partnerships” with a range of states. They reflect the emergence of an actor seeking to establish foreign policy goals with an attendant institutional architecture and political commitment. This paper examines two of these partnerships: the United States and China. It is illustrated how the EU constructs a collective identity for itself by discursively associating itself with great power states, while claiming a normative character as an actor of a different kind, with capabilities to act strategically with great power states, by temporal and ethical forms of social distancing from these same actors. This paper consults recent survey research to assess the success of these EU discursive strategies. It is concluded that these partnerships play a useful role in establishing the EU as an actor of global significance, while the EU is less successful in its inherent claims of normative superiority.