Europe's surrender summer

Those defending the EU's "trade deal" with Trump are missing the forest for the trees. Whether or not the EU can actually make the payments promised, von der Leyen has cemented subservience.

As she scurried to the tarmac after having been summoned by the US president to his private golf course in Scotland, the EU president hurriedly tried to justify the agreement she had just signed with him. “It’s the biggest trade deal ever” Ursula von der Leyen posted on X, promising an economic boom as a result. But her desperate attempts to polish a turd went too far, it was clumsy gaslighting. Because what she had agreed to wasn’t a trade deal at all. It was a one-sided capitulation, with the EU making a series of tributes to Washington in order to avoid Trump’s threatened 30% or 50% blanket tariffs. Looking more like a hostage than a negotiating partner, she even parroted Trump’s words saying the purpose of the deal is to ‘correct a trade imbalance’, accepting the false premise that the tariffs are reciprocal. It was a ‘peace for our time’ moment for the EU president, even if she had no actual piece of paper to wave on the tarmac.

Others had more accurate descriptions. “It's nothing more than one of the most expensive imperial tributes in history,” said French pundit Arnaud Bertrand. “This does not even remotely resemble the type of agreements made by two equal sovereign powers. It rather looks like the type of unequal treaties that colonial powers used to impose in the 19th century – except this time, Europe is on the receiving end.” French prime minister François Bayrou said, “It is a dark day when an alliance of free peoples, united to affirm their values and defend their interests, resolves to submission.” The Financial Times concluded, “the EU has validated Trump’s bullying trade agenda.” John Clarke, the EU’s former top trade negotiator, called it, “the end of time for the EU’s common commercial policy.” Italian pundit Alberto Alemanno said with this agreement the EU has “effectively abandoned its quest for strategic autonomy - largely due to its member states’ hesitation and mundane domestic interests.”

But it seems many pro-EU folk, on both sides of the Atlantic, just can’t admit that Trump has scored a major victory here - for himself rather than for the country he represents. They have pointed out, correctly, that there’s no way the EU can actually deliver its commitments to buy $750 billion in liquified natural gas from the US and $600 billion in European investments in America. The EU was playing chess while Trump was playing checkers, they insist, tricking him into thinking he’d scored a major victory when in fact what the EU offers are only empty words. Such defences have been particularly vociferous from remainers in the UK, who seem to think that the EU can do no wrong. But as someone who’s been covering the EU in Brussels for 15 years, I can assure you there is no chess being played here by anyone.

Yes, this “trade deal”, just like the concession offers from others like Japan, South Korea and the UK, is full of largely undeliverable investment promises which will never be delivered on. But at their core is the unavoidable central promise: they have all validated Trump’s blatantly illegal tariffs and promised not to oppose them at the World Trade Organisation, essentially signing the WTO’s death warrant and collapsing the global rules-based trade order. “Europe has condoned Trump’s totally illegal tariff hikes, in defiance of international law,” wrote Clarke in a column for Euractiv. Yes, “the EU made - thankfully - empty and unenforceable promises to buy more US energy, invest $600 billion in US manufacturing, and buy more US weaponry, all of which it was already planning to do.” But the most important and most consequential part is that Europe has accepted blatantly arbitrary and illegal tariffs as legal, with the EU agreeing to 15% and the UK agreeing to 10%. Both “trade deals” were acts of surrender, though while the UK had no choice but to cave in, the EU had the heft to resist but chose not to.

“The EU proved unable to use its considerable leverage as the world’s biggest trading bloc to get a balanced agreement,” noted Clarke. “And it failed to get its member states to take a unified stance – notably to do what China did and impose perfectly legitimate retaliatory duties (the only language Trump understands).” And European companies are fooling themselves if they think the US-EU trade relationship has now stabilised, he wrote. Now that he has intimidated Europe into submission, Trump will keep coming back with more demands. And that’s just the medium-term damage. In the long term, Europe (London and Brussels) has demonstrated to the world that they are weaklings that can be bossed around. “China, Russia and others will be buying the popcorn and smugly watching this act of self-harm.”

Guardian columnist Larry Elliot had perhaps the most damning and depressing take published this morning, calling this the EU’s “Suez moment”. In 1956, London’s capitulation to Washington in the Suez crisis was “a recognition of Britain’s [and France’s] diminished status on the world stage,” he wrote. So too the EU’s surrender sends the message that its promises of pooled sovereignty in exchange for global strength were hollow, and that Europe remains a vassal of the United States whether or not its individual states pool sovereignty. “The deal may prove to be a pyrrhic victory for Trump if, as looks increasingly likely, tariffs increase the cost of goods in the US,” he writes. “But while there would be a tinge of schadenfreude in Europe were the bubble in US asset prices to burst, any joy in Trump’s misfortune would prove short-lived.” Those correctly noting that the tariffs will be mostly born by American consumers are missing the point. European consumers will also be hurt. Everyone loses here except Trump, who has solidified his power over Europe and demonstrated to the world that he has this continent’s capitals in his pocket. The economics here are secondary in importance to the geopolitics.

I disagree with much, perhaps most, of the conclusions in Elliot’s column (particularly the bizarre conclusion that this is a win for Brexit Britain because their tariffs are 5% lower). But it got me thinking. The people who are fiercely defending the EU’s surrender right now by focusing on the short-term economic and military details might also have been defending the UK’s Suez surrender in 1956 by correctly pointing out that the UK did not have the means or short-term interests to defend the canal. I can see them arguing that Britain benefits from the canal whether or not it controls it, running through the numbers and trade stats.

The difference, of course, is that the Suez crisis signalled the end of power while the Turnberry surrender likely signals the end of an ambition for power. London and Paris were rightly humiliated by the Suez crisis and it was their hubris and refusal to accept that new post-war reality that got them into the mess. Their time was over. But Brussels’ time was just beginning. Eden and Molay were admitting a pre-ordained defeat for collapsing empires. Von der Leyen has preemptively surrendered and squandered three decades of work to build up the EU as a sovereign power.

The deal defenders say this isn’t really a surrender because the EU doesn’t actually have to deliver what it promised, the tariffs will hurt American consumers more than Europeans, and that the humiliation is necessary because it is the only way to keep the Americans from forcing Ukraine to surrender to Russia and abandoning their NATO protectorate over Europe. As I noted in my Substack Live yesterday with Julien Hoez from The French Dispatch, that last argument is particularly gross because it implies the EU must fully accept vassalage to the United States in order to prevent Ukraine from becoming a vassal to Russia. But the previous two arguments are also nonsensical.

If the argument is that tariffs will be born by the American consumer and not majorly impact European businesses, then why was the EU so afraid of the prospect of 30% or 50% tariffs being imposed on the 1 August deadline? The market reaction after “Liberation Day” four months ago showed that such levels result in such a panic (particularly on the bond markets) that Trump doesn’t actually end up going through with them (or, as Wall Street has taken to calling the phenomenon, Trump Always Chickens Out). The argument that the EU had to agree to legitimise the 15% tariff because it would have faced an economically devastating tariff twice that rate otherwise (or a 50% tariff against the EU as Trump previously threatened) assumed both that the tariffs would hurt the EU more than the US and that Trump would have been willing to go through with it. Indeed, it now appears that he wouldn’t have because he said after the EU “deal” that the countries that did not reach deals by tomorrow’s deadline will be facing a “15% to 20%” tariff. In other words, the EU would likely have ended up with the same tariff whether it signed this surrender deal or not. But if von der Leyen hadn’t signed the deal, then they could have challenged the blatantly illegal 15% tariffs with the WTO and kept the global rules-based trade order alive.

What the deal defenders don’t understand is that this isn’t about the specifics of a $600 billion investment commitment or the vagaries of who will be impacted most by tariffs. This is about the big picture: the signal the EU has sent to Washington and the world that it is an owned continent that is in Trump’s pocket. And it doesn’t come in a vacuum. It’s been a whole summer of surrender for Europe, starting with the UK’s surrender deal with Trump in May followed by the humiliating spectacle of European leaders grovelling to Trump and calling him “daddy” at the NATO summit in The Hague in June. NATO’s European vassals enthusiastically signed up to a non-sensical box-ticking demand from the US president which, as Minna Ålander pointed out in the Financial Times yesterday, will not make Europe safer. Efforts to build sovereign European-controlled defence have fizzled out, and the Europeans have fully accepted the NATO American protectorate as the continued vehicle for European defence. There has been almost no real effort to build a European command-and-control that could defend this continent without the assistance or coordination of the United States. In fact, the European commitments to buy even more of their military equipment from the American military-industrial complex rather than from European providers (a ratio which is already at two-thirds) will only further lock this continent in to American dependence. We are moving backwards.

With that in mind, the deal defenders’ argument that this surrender is “buying time” while Europe builds its sovereignty makes no sense because Europeans are making no such efforts. The whole continent, including the UK, is trapped in inertia as it stares helplessly at the enormity of the problem. This is not buying time. This is helpless appeasement because our leaders simply don’t have the political courage to think of anything else.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Keir Starmer may have had no choice but to sell his citizens down the river in order to appease the American president, but the EU’s prime ministers and presidents did have a choice. It is unfair to blame von der Leyen solely for this surrender. She was, after all, acting based on the consensus in the European Council (led by Germany’s Merz and Italy’s Meloni) that it was too risky to stand up to Trump. While President Macron protested, he did not make any serious effort to build a consensus in the Council for the use of the EU’s ‘nuclear options’ - slapping tariffs on American services imports and using the new anti-coercion instrument against Trump’s extortion. This is a collective failure, not just by President von der Leyen and not just by the 27 national EU leaders, but by all Europeans.

EU citizens elected these national leaders who appointed von der Leyen not in spite of the fact that she is weak but because of it. These leaders have faced no domestic political backlash for their instruction to the president to surrender. The people of Europe are simply not paying attention. They seem happy to be gaslit as the NATO Secretary General tells them the fake 5% target is a huge victory for Europe and the EU president tells them they’ve just scored the largest free trade deal in history. “If Europeans were paying attention (or being told the truth), they should be beyond appalled by this ‘deal’,” fumed an exasperated Bertrand on Sunday. But the point is that Europeans are not paying attention, and they’re happy not to be told the truth. They’ve been lied to their whole lives about the degree of this continent’s dependence on the United States. It’s a faustian bargain that they participate in gladly in order to not have to think about how they can preserve their way of life.

Tomorrow is August 1st and already this continent is on its month-long vacation. I’m one to talk, as I write this Substack sitting on a beach in Barcelona. We should be proud of what Europe has accomplished and the fact that we enjoy the best quality of life in the world. We should never forget that life for Americans in the United States is much more difficult than what we enjoy here. But we cannot take our European way of life for granted. As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in The Leopard, "in order for things to stay the same, everything has to change".

I’m spending the next month finishing writing my book about this continent’s cultural dependence on the United States and how Europeans’ Hollywood-infected brains are the reason behind their urge to consistently surrender to the United States. Hopefully I’ll have some news about that in September (and a possible book launch event in Brussels in October). I still hope that one day the people of Europe will wake up and rise up, but I am steadily losing hope. We get the leaders we deserve, and President von der Leyen is an accurate expression of Europeans’ apathy and delusion. There is still time to wake up, but time is running out. And we still don’t know what’s in store for the rest of our surrender summer.