The US president believes the EU will obey — and he may be right
US President Donald Trump wasn’t joking. As promised, he has launched a dramatic overhaul of his country’s trade policy, introducing sweeping tariffs to force what he calls a rebalancing of imports and exports with key partners.
[...]
Economists are largely in agreement: any gains from this approach, if they come, will be long-term. In the short term, Americans can expect higher inflation, struggling manufacturers, weakened consumer power, and declining market capitalization. But Trump is not concerned with consensus. He is a political brawler, and his goal is not simply economic reform, but to fundamentally reshape the global system that, in his view, is dragging America toward decline.
To understand Trump’s mindset, it is worth recalling the now-infamous 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” written by conservative thinker Michael Anton. In it, Anton compared Trump voters to the passengers of the hijacked plane on 9/11 who charged the cockpit, sacrificing their lives to stop disaster. The metaphor was stark: America, hijacked by liberal globalists, was on a suicidal course. Trump, in this framing, was the last-ditch response to avert collapse.
[...]
[...] It is as if the logic of Flight 93, once applied to US domestic politics, has now expanded to the entire world. The Trump administration sees the current global order as unsustainable and even dangerous to American power. In their view, if the system isn’t smashed now, the US will soon be unable to fix it at all.
Trump believes he can strongarm countries into renegotiating trade deals by leveraging America’s market power. For some, this may work. Many nations simply cannot afford a full-blown trade war with the US. But the two key targets of Trump’s economic offensive – China and the European Union – are not so easily bullied.
[...]
Trump seems to expect full capitulation from Brussels, and soon.
This expectation may be misguided. Western European governments are under internal economic pressure, especially with growing protests from industry and agriculture, which bear the brunt of rising costs and lost export markets. Yet Brussels remains ideologically committed to the transatlantic alliance and the liberal economic order, even as that order is being rewritten from Washington.
From everything folks have been posting about what Europe's leaders think, this is probably true.