Finding a European Fighting Spirit

On July 28, 2025, US President Donald Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met in Turnberry, Scotland, and announced the outline of a trade deal between the EU and the US. The terms are heavily skewed in favor of the US, giving many—including me—the impression that we surrendered to Trump’s trade war without even trying to fight.

The terms of the agreement

Because this deal is more of a handshake than a formal trade agreement, its terms can be summarized in a few points:

• Industrial goods imported from the EU into the US face a baseline tariff of 15%.

• The tariff is not reciprocal: cars imported from the US into the EU face a much lower 2.5% tariff, and the Commission has proposed reducing incoming tariffs to 0% on products such as machinery, pharmaceuticals, some chemicals, plastics, and fertilizers.

• The baseline excludes aluminum and steel, which still face a 50% tariff when entering the US.

• Aircraft and aircraft parts will have reciprocal tariff‑free trade.

In addition, Ursula von der Leyen pledged that, before the end of Donald Trump’s term, the EU would:

• purchase $750B of energy products—oil, coal, and gas—from the US.

• invest $600B in the US.

These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt—or even a handful—since those purchases and investments are decisions made by private companies the Commission cannot control.

The case for the deal

The immediate reactions were cautiously positive, with only Viktor Orbán of Hungary and French Prime Minister François Bayrou coming out strongly against it. Nobody, however, is claiming that the terms are good for Europe, from Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez declaring: “I support this commercial agreement, but I do so without any enthusiasm.”, to Polish prime minister Donald Tusk saying: “There is little reason to celebrate”, to German chancellor Friedrich Merz stating: “We cannot be satisfied with this result, but it’s the best we could get given the situation”.

The main argument for this deal is apparently that there is a deal at all. “We avoided trade conflict here, which would be ruinous,” said Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin, a position echoed by Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who insisted the agreement had warded off “potentially devastating consequences”. If the mere existence of the deal is a positive outcome, then the one announced was the best we could hope for. The rationale is that the 15% baseline tariff is much better than the 30% Trump had threatened, and that having an agreement brings much‑needed stability.

More technical arguments in favor are also being offered. One holds that the US is the ultimate loser, as tariffs will be paid by US consumers and, by sheltering US producers, will make them less competitive. The research arm of a German investment fund gave a detailed explanation of this argument, picked up by German newspaper FAZ. They reach this conclusion by looking at the policies of Latin American countries such as Argentina in the 1970s; I have my doubts about the parallel’s applicability, given the US’s market power stemming from the size of its economy and the dollar’s status as both the engine of international trade and the world’s reserve currency.

Another technical argument concerns the auto industry: while exports from the US face no tariffs entering the EU, many “US” cars are actually manufactured in Canada and Mexico, and currently face a 25% tariff when entering the US. This holds today, but a non‑reciprocal tariff still provides an incentive for European manufacturers to shift production to the US.

The strongest argument I have seen is not economic. It stems from comments by EU trade chief Maroš Šefčovič on the day the agreement was announced: given Donald Trump’s mercurial temperament, there was a high risk that pushing too hard on tariffs would anger him enough to change his mind again regarding support for Ukraine, where Europe depends on the US in a few key areas such as air defense, satellite intelligence, and Starlink. In other words, the deal exposes the systemic nature of our dependence on the US, and it is up to us to fix that.

A negative political signal

It took me a while to form an informed opinion of this agreement. The arguments in its favor are well constructed and rational, and in the end they may be right. But I believe they miss the mark insofar as they tend to focus narrowly on economic consequences. I see this deal and its fallout as primarily a political matter. The question is whether, in the turbulent world that is dawning, the EU can pursue an autonomous policy.

This will have economic consequences as well. Europe was starting to be seen as a haven for investors due to its stability, but the Sentix investor confidence index fell sharply after the agreement was announced. This makes sense: the agreement signals that the final say is in Washington, so Europe can expect no more stability than Donald Trump allows.

It is also hard to ignore that the UK got a better deal. There are technicalities, but their baseline is a 10% tariff, including steel, versus 15% without steel for the EU. Contemplating this, I can’t help but wonder: What is the point of European integration, then? It is a project I ardently support, but this agreement shook my confidence in it. What is the point of having a common European political and administrative body whose clear mandate is to look after the interests of the continent as a whole, if those interests would have been better served by national governments? What is the point of having a single currency and a single trade area, covering hundreds of millions of people, steered at the continental level, if that scale brings slower decision‑making but no tangible improvement in the outcome? What, in short, is the point of a Union that does not result in strength? What could have been a clear demonstration of the value of European institutions ends up instead as fodder for eurosceptics.

This moment feels all the more like a missed opportunity, as we already had a rehearsal in the post‑Brexit negotiations of 2017–19, with the Trump‑inspired Boris Johnson at the helm and Brexiteers who did not shy away from bad‑faith tactics and “alternative facts”. We held the line back then, but it seems that a repeat with the US was a bridge too far.

Some of the blame must be placed at Ursula von der Leyen’s feet. It may be that she is not as skilled a negotiator as Michel Barnier was on Brexit. But pointing the finger only at her would be unfair: her job involves corralling EU member states’ leaders, and she is limited by how far they are willing to go. It does not seem they were willing to go very far; or there was enough fighting spirit to go around.

De-escalation as a central tenet

In the months leading up to July 28, I did not sense that European leaders had much willingness to make a credible threat and see it through. The talking points most often repeated were the need to de‑escalate and avoid a trade war at all costs. We heard it on April 10 from Portuguese premier Luis Montenegro: “The absolute priority is to negotiate with the United States,” and on July 17 from Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni: “The government is at work to avoid a trade war […] all our efforts are focused on this.” The mantra that there are “no winners in a trade war” was another talking point we could hear in January from Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and in February from Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief.

This sense that a tougher approach was not seriously considered is confirmed by EU actions since February. A first, small package of retaliatory measures—limited to €21B worth of goods (less than a tenth of US exports to the EU)—was announced on April 9 and suspended the day after as a consequence of Trump announcing a three‑month pause in tariffs, the equivalent of apologizing to someone who just body‑slammed you. A second retaliatory package covering €72B of merchandise was proposed on July 14 but never adopted.

I’ll quote alt‑right guru Curtis Yarvin here: the reason Trump is so powerful is “because his enemies don’t believe in themselves” (source). My sense is that we don’t really believe in our ability to shake off our dependence on the US and chart our own path. It seems we are struggling to accept that the world order that applied only a few months ago is now lost to history, and we are hoping that by making ourselves inconspicuous we can preserve it for a little while longer.

Preservation politics

This sense of loss is part and parcel of contemporary politics in the Western world. Different sides of the political spectrum emphasize different dimensions of loss: leftists focus on environmental loss or the loss of equal opportunity as evidenced by rising inequalities, while right‑wingers might point to the loss of a common cultural fabric through immigration, or rising crime eroding a sense of safety. Shared by all is the urge to preserve what is being lost, rather than to offer a positive vision of tomorrow to work toward.

The prevalence of this sense of loss in political discourse is not limited to Europe. The US is as subject to it as we are: you only need to think of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” tagline. What we have in common with them is the sense that the world is escaping our control, that we used to have it easier. It is not an unjustified feeling: the G7’s share of global GDP expressed in purchasing power parity has fallen from 50% in the 1980s to 28% today, just under that of the BRICS countries, reflecting the emergence of new power centers in the world.

The difference is that the US has rallied around its one major success of the past two decades—its dominance in software and technology—as a sort of talisman against that sense of loss. From that perspective, Trump’s closeness with tech barons makes complete sense, as does the singular American focus on technology as the only way out of our current environmental crisis.

The question for us is: what is our talisman? What is the goal we can optimistically build toward in the long term? If we can’t articulate what we’re fighting for, we’ll have a hard time finding our fighting spirit.

What we’re fighting for

“What do we want?” is not an easy question for twenty‑seven countries, but our changing world might provide the best opportunity yet to answer it, if only by contrast.

This deal is very clearly political for the US; the investment and energy‑purchase pledges are hazy and may never materialize, but they signal that Europe is willing to pay tribute. US leadership is already behaving as if it had a say in EU domestic policy: days before this trade deal was announced, Trump took the time to tell Europeans to “get [their] act together” on immigration; and only a month later he threatened new tariffs on all countries that would not suppress their digital regulations that “discriminate against American firms,” just as the FTC was sending letters to big American tech firms telling them not to apply the EU’s Digital Services Act, which aims to increase the transparency of online platform algorithms. As Elon Musk’s recent outspoken support for the AfD in Germany shows, this is likely to go beyond regulation: the more we accept, the more US leaders will grow accustomed to the idea that they determine our politics.

Our common political goal should at minimum be to prevent that from occurring. It should not be too hard to agree on the following:

• We do not want policy dictated by the whims of a foreign president and a few tech barons.

• We do not want conspiracy influencers like Laura Loomer to have the ability to get people in government fired.

• We do not want science to be subject to government censorship, or discussions on the impending threat of our environmental crisis to be suppressed.

But we should express this in the positive too. When I see Oracle chairman Larry Ellison marvel at the ability of AI to keep citizens “on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on” (source), I think that the country I moved to over ten years ago, drawn by an atmosphere of creativity and optimism, may now be facing a dark future. Against the techno‑monarchic alliance of Silicon Valley with the alt‑right, and its dreams of a post‑human future where individuals don’t matter, where truth depends on who’s in power and decency is apparently not a word in the dictionary anymore, we should proudly embrace our own vision for tomorrow, centered on human welfare rather than fascination with the machines we build. Our recent European history has made us somewhat bearish on political utopia, but it is something we could use right now—both for ourselves and in support of the millions of Americans who also oppose this vision.

Accepting risks

The first step is realizing that we will not get to choose our own future without putting up a fight. This trade deal underscores the weaknesses created by some of our external dependencies; but we should not make the mistake of focusing only on our weaknesses. The European regulatory framework is precisely one of our strengths, which is why it’s being targeted. The flip side of our dependency on American technology firms is that Europe is a key market for them, and we should make credible threats that they might lose access to it.

With 65% of the cloud market going to American hyperscalers Amazon, Google and Microsoft, a decision on their part to leave the continent would certainly disrupt the operations of companies, infrastructure, and public services. That would be painful. Accepting that risk and planning for it, accepting that we may have to face discomfort and pain, is a key second step in mounting a proper fight.

In particular, we must reckon with the fact that our current political priorities still stem from decisions made in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when our position in the world was much more favorable. The disappearance of any threat from the USSR allowed shrinking military budgets to support increasing healthcare and retirement spending: in the UK and France, for example, defense spending as a percentage of GDP was halved between 1980 and 2020, while spending on pensions doubled in the same timeframe and spending on education remained stable. To improve our outlook, we need to invest more in our future, and we cannot do that while supporting an ever‑growing pension burden.

The point is not to attribute blame for past political decisions. This deal happened because our past decisions put us in a position of weakness; we should shoulder that blame collectively and move forward together.

Conclusion

As the Guardian recently noted, Trump is now the great unifier of Europe. The issue is that we are only acting reactively to his mood changes, because we are too focused on keeping the peace. This reaction is natural, as peace is at the core of the European project. We have had the luxury of focusing solely on the continent’s internal peace because external peace was guaranteed by growing the european project under the auspices of US power. As Tony Blair wrote a decade ago, the rationale for Europe today is not peace; it is power. We must embark on a path of European power and power projection if we are to have an independent voice in the world.

This will not happen without a fight. One silver lining from this trade agreement is that it seems to be acting as a wake‑up call. On the day the deal was announced, German Vice‑Chancellor Lars Klingbeil deemed it “good that there [was] an agreement with the US and no further escalation,” only to declare a week later: “We have been too weak.” I trust a politician to sense the shifting winds of public opinion, and I can only hope that this about‑face reflects the wider sentiment of the public.

As I write this conclusion, the EU Commission has just announced a €3B fine on Google for breaching antitrust rules with its ads platform. That fine was initially due to be announced four days ago but had been halted on the objections of trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič, over fears it might jeopardize the trade agreement. Mere hours after the fine was made public, Donald Trump threatened retaliation. Maybe our fighting spirit is not so far after all.