(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. A vueltas con los aranceles del maligno)
Donald Trump has said that if there is no trade agreement with the European Union right now, then from 1 June the US will apply tariffs of 50% on all products coming from the European Union. The North American president thus displays his displeasure with the manner of the European Commission in negotiations that contrast with those other countries have carried out with the US swiftly and soundly, and which have concluded in bilateral trade agreements.
The European Commission is led by Ursula von der Leyen and a great many other people who have so scorned, insulted, caricatured and ridiculed Donald Trump and his team that it is proving wholly incapable of accepting a new reality in which its hostility towards the president, its arrogance, its haughtiness and its pretended moral superiority are terribly counterproductive. They will probably now redouble their insults against Trump and his government, and all the European media that are well-paid mouthpieces for those Brussels positions will cry out to high heaven.
A problem added to the initial ill disposition and to all the implicit technical difficulties lies in the fact that the European Commission charged with negotiating sees in the other party, in Trump’s government, an ally of its worst enemies: the conservative and patriotic forces that are growing in Europe and threatening to wrest political hegemony and power from this two-party system of Populars and Socialists which, with its liberal, green and communist satellites, governs in the EU and has controlled all the institutions, including the European Parliament, since its foundation.
With the permanent growth of these patriotic, sovereigntist and conservative forces, which enjoy the express sympathies of members of the North American government, Brussels’ hostility towards Trump is also part of its obsession with not losing total control of the EU and the power which, for the first time in the history of the EU, it sees endangered. The European Union spends billions on propaganda for its policy, financing media outlets and NGOs in a manner that is not even always legal. This highly ideological propaganda, directed against the conservative and national forces, has also always been violently anti-Trump.
That is well known in Washington and it does not help. But the criteria Washington is applying have in none of the cases so far, many already resolved, been ideological. The US insists that the tariffs it is imposing are an absolutely proportionate and reasonable response to all the thousand barriers and impediments, whether tariff, fiscal or regulatory, that the European Union imposes on its products and its services. And it is in this field that we are going to see for the first time this clash between two economies that call themselves free-market but which in Europe has been converted into a frenetic regulatory and interventionist race, into something very far from any freedom at all.
The jungle of interference, regulations, laws, directives and impositions in the name of a delirious, ideologically motivated social engineering have made Europe a closed economy even for Europeans themselves. Hence its growth, productivity and well-being have been stagnant for years.
The truth is that the North American tariffs, if indeed they arrive, will be a response to that ideological bunkerisation which the governing elites and the bureaucratic apparatus of the EU have imposed throughout Europe under Germany’s baton, an apparatus that is today already more ideological than the Central Committees of the Soviet orbit and their commissions for the five-year plans.
European countries have now been suffering for many decades the general deterioration of the economy, of industry, of education, of health care and many other fields because of the mistaken, ideological, irrational, self-harming and often suicidal policy of Brussels. But now it may be that they suffer in traumatic fashion this failure of a policy and the incapacity, the absolute impossibility, of the European Commission to defend effectively the interests of the countries it claims to represent.
Because what they say in Washington is very true: that many European countries do not know how their national interests are being negotiated by the European Commission. And many may be certain that their interests are being sacrificed to the interests of other countries, or to ideological positions and global political conveniences that the European Commission is pursuing.
Giorgia Meloni is the one who, from her Italian government, is making the greatest efforts to ensure that Brussels, with its whole bureaucratic and technical apparatus made up of highly ideologised, anti-conservative, anti-American and of course furiously anti-Trump personnel, does not turn the need for radical changes into a war with the US that would be suicidal for many European sectors and regions. In that case the European countries will suffer catastrophically that surrender of sovereignty which had been presented to them as a joining of forces that would improve their negotiating position. On the contrary, that cession of sovereignty has left their interests in the hands of powerful forces which have different and even contrary interests when it comes to negotiating with the US.
The crisis opened between a Trump administration and a European Commission whose principal mark of identity, apart from hypocrisy and failure over all these past years, is hostility towards Trump, may lead many European sectors and many European regions to disaster. Let us hope that the European Commission, pressed by some reasonable governments in the EU and by reality and necessity themselves, will reconsider its positions. It is true that on many questions they are being required to climb down from some of the ideological positions they have most developed, see the whole climate and energy hysteria, and which have done the most damage to the development of the European economies.
If a good agreement is reached, the European nations will have things to thank Trump for. If total war is reached, the European nations will have to ask themselves whether things would not have gone much better for them in a negotiation of their own, as the United Kingdom has done swiftly and successfully, rather than being represented by some who are in no way defending the specific interests of certain nations.
Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.
