The European Union trade deal with the United States amounts to a capitulation to President Donald Trump.
Yes, Trump had already made certain concessions in advance, by preemptively walking back his outrageous opening gambit in the tariff war when markets rebelled against the policy. But since that walk-back, the president has enjoyed a run of victories, establishing a new base line for U.S. tariff revenue with minimal retaliation from our trading partners.
The deal that Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, sealed with Trump on July 27 is part of this new normal, in which most countries appear willing to pay extra for access to our markets, and it’s not America but the rest of the world that seems to be chickening out.
There is a hard lesson here, not just for observers hoping for a more muscular European trade policy, but also for anyone who has spent the early months of the second Trump administration imagining that a populist-governed United States might somehow end up isolated on the world stage.
This fantasy of isolation has been a source of both comfort and schadenfreude for anti-Trump liberals, since it offers a vision of potential political escape from populism, with liberal culture reconstituted in Toronto or Oxford or Scandinavia, and a vision of a Trumpian America suffering economic punishment as its walls rise higher and the rest of the world prospers through mutual exchange.
But both conceits — a world economic order that isolates America and a liberal order that continues on without us — are fundamental misreadings of the global situation, which the foreign leaders who have bowed to Trump’s demands seem to understand quite clearly.
Too big to ignore
The first thing they understand is that American economic power is just too big to escape or isolate or ignore. Before Trump’s 2024 victory, the economic story was one in which American growth was clearly pulling away from our peer economies in Europe and East Asia. Since Trump’s return to power, the economic story is one in which even protectionist policies that almost every economist deplores haven’t prevented the American stock market from rising and the American growth machine from churning onward.
Moreover, even if Trump reverts to deeper folly and causes a recession, the forces favoring the United States over Germany or Britain or South Korea or Japan will still be present in the next administration and beyond. Almost all of our liberal-democratic peers are poorer than we are and too sclerotic to suddenly surge past us. There is just no booming, youthful, dynamic, entrepreneurial zone capable of taking the place of America in a network of free economies, and therefore no substitute for trade with our companies and access to our markets, even at a Trumpian price.
There is, of course, the People’s Republic of China, which — is strong enough to stand up to Trump’s bullying and dynamic enough to stand as a counterweight to American economic might. But unless your country is already authoritarian — and not necessarily even then — the risks of throwing yourself fully into China’s orbit are still much more extreme than the costs of managing a populist administration in Washington. This doesn’t mean other countries won’t end up trading more with China because of American protectionism. But there is no plausible world where China simply replaces the United States as a trusted partner and pillar of globalization.
Here the economic story links up with the political one. If it’s implausible to imagine a network of European and Asian economies prospering without the American leviathan, it’s even less plausible to imagine some kind of liberal world order reconstituting itself separately from the United States.
In part this is about hard power. A liberal world order consisting of Western Europe and Canada would not be an order but an impotent anachronism. Even as the post-Cold War order fades away and America’s leader boasts about acting purely in self-interest, the United States is still called upon to mediate conflicts between India and Pakistan or Cambodia and Thailand or Congo and Rwanda, even as it continues to supply weaponry that protects Taiwan and staves off defeat for Ukraine.
No liberal alternative
Should American power retreat fully from that role, there is no liberal successor waiting in the wings. And the concessions made to Trump by NATO members on military spending targets, like the European Union’s trade concessions, reflect an awareness of this reality — in which it’s always better to help prop up the Pax Americana than to seek to build a post-American system.
But the other crucial political point is that the crisis of liberalism is general, not specific to the United States, and there is no obvious expat refuge from the ideological conflicts of our age.
For now Trump’s Man of Destiny has given American populism a special power, but it’s not as if liberalism is resilient or thriving in Europe or East Asia while it decays in the United States. Populism already rules in Italy and Hungary, it might govern France and Britain soon, it is rising in Germany, and Japan and South Korea have their own forms of post-liberal polarization.
At the same time, Western progressivism has its own obvious illiberal features, European countries under notionally liberal governments are busy suppressing free expression and sometimes democracy itself, and the tensions of multiculturalism may make the European order more unstable than our own. And both radicalism and reaction on the continent show a distinct American imprint (our anti-racist jargon spread quickly to Britain, and the Conservative Political Action Conference now pops up in Poland and Hungary), indicating that our cultural influence may be resilient whichever way the Europeans tilt.
Over the years I have known both left-wing and right-wing Americans who have decamped from our country for what seem like more politically congenial situations — escaping wokeness in Eastern Europe, escaping Trumpism in Canada or Britain.
My suggestion to these friends has been consistent: Whatever your ideals or fears, whatever your beliefs about the good society, the battles you care about will be won or lost in the United States.
The refuges are illusory, the alternatives are compromised or weak, and the future of freedom will be American or it will not be at all.
Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist.
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