50%. Trump’s braked tariff against the European Union (EU) would represent a commercial embargo. The threat comes along with the tariff truce signed with China. US President devotes genuine EU hatred – and has its reasons for this.
“The European Union was formed for the purpose of taking advantage of the US. This is its purpose – and they did a good job in that direction.” The EU would exist to extract unilateral benefits of trade with the US and to outsource the costs of its military security. Trump’s diagnosis summarizes a worldview.
However, as taught Carl Bildt, a former Swedish government chief, refuting Trump’s historical revisionism, the EU was “actually created to prevent war on the European continent.” Hitler’s rebel daughter (Nazi catastrophe) and Stalin (the spectrum of the USSR) – that’s the EU.
The EU was born from the womb of the European community (1957). The seed of everything is in CECA, established in 1951 from a Franco-German political agreement. NATO had emerged three years earlier and, in its frame, the rearmament of Western Germany began, which caused chills among the French.
The German Empire had been proclaimed at the Versailles Palace after the French defeat in 1871. France had suffered German invasions in the two great wars of the 20th century. How to reconcile French and Germans in the Atlantic Alliance of the Cold War? The solution, formulated by the French Jean Monnet, materialized in the Schuman plane: uniting the two nations in an economic community, Ceca.
Coal, the source of energy, and steel, the base of the weapons, were placed under a common market, which was joined by Italy and Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg). Much later, shortly after German reunification, by the same logic, the Treaty of Maastrich (1992) launched the monetary union. Nations that share the same coin will not make war with each other.
The statesmen sculpt us united – and only then asked economists to make the sprint work. The US supported the European project, as the Franco-German alliance was the indispensable requirement of the Atlantic alliance. Rebating Trump, and covered with reason, the European Commission explained that the EU has always been a “blessing” for the US.
But it cannot be convinced by a history course. Its narrative drips from a hate pond: the visceral aversion of populism to the most iconic building of institutionalism.
The nations mix reason (institutions anchored in the law) and emotion (national history, as told by their elites). Populism articulates as a resentful version of national history: the sword that promises to remedy sin, restoring virtue. The EU, however, is not a nation, lacking emotional content. She does not have a leader elected by the people. In it, there is only reason: the cold letter of the treaties that subordinates their leaders, their justice and their bureaucracy.
Trump sees the world as a stage of transactions between powerful or supplicant sovereigns. XI Jinping and Vladimir Putin emerge in the landscape as equal interlocutors. But the immense rock of Europe is not subjected to a sovereign – and therefore, it must be destroyed. This is why Trump and his deputy, Jd Vance, declare support to Hungarian nationalist Orbán and German AFD extremists. None of this has relation to trade.
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