EU trade deal is a capitulation to America
The punitive conditions (for Europe) of the EU-US trade deal are the ultimate example of the fact that the European Union has delivered a structural subordination to the US unseen in the postwar era
This is a longer version of an article that appeared originally in UnHerd.
On Sunday, the European Union and the United States finalised a trade agreement imposing a 15% tariff on most EU exports to the US — a deal US President Donald Trump triumphantly hailed as “the biggest one of them all”. While the agreement averted an even harsher 30% tariff threatened by Washington, many in Europe are calling it a resounding defeat — or even an unconditional surrender — for the EU.
It’s easy to see why. The 15% tariff on EU goods entering the US is significantly higher than the 10% that Brussels had hoped to negotiate. Meanwhile, as Trump himself boasted, the EU has “opened up their countries at zero tariff” to American exports. Crucially, EU steel and aluminium will continue to face a crushing 50% tariff when sold into the US market.
This asymmetry places European producers at a severe disadvantage, raising costs for strategic industries like automotive, pharmaceuticals and advanced manufacturing — sectors that underpin the EU’s $1.97 trillion transatlantic trade relationship. The so-called “rebalancing” measures clearly tilt the playing field in favour of the US, forcing European economies to absorb higher costs simply to preserve access to American markets.
Even worse, the EU has committed to $600 billion in new US investments, $750 billion in long-term energy purchases and increased procurement of American military hardware. This further deepens Europe’s structural dependency on US energy supplies and military resources.
The political reaction in Europe has been scathing. French Minister Benjamin Haddad labelled the agreement “unbalanced”, noting that while French spirits secured a narrow exemption, the overall terms were deeply unfavourable. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tried to present the deal as a pragmatic compromise to avoid an all-out trade war, but few were convinced. As geopolitical commentator Arnaud Bertrand observed on X:
In exchange for all these concessions and extraction of their wealth the EU gets... nothing. 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.
A few lessons can be drawn. First, the deal should finally shatter the longstanding myth that the EU strengthens its member states by increasing their negotiating power. For decades, Europeans have been told that only by pooling sovereignty into a supranational bloc could they wield enough collective clout to stand up to global powers. This was always a convenient fiction. In reality, the opposite is true: the EU systematically erodes the ability of individual nations to respond flexibly to domestic and external challenges based on their own economic and political priorities.
The EU’s rigid framework — its multilayered and bureaucratic decision-making structure, chronic lack of democratic accountability and suffocating regulatory overreach — only compounds these weaknesses. The result is exactly what we have just witnessed: the EU accepting worse terms than those negotiated even by the UK, post-Brexit and far smaller.
Indeed, the EU is practically the only major partner that has capitulated so completely to Trump’s aggressive trade tactics. China, India and even mid-sized economies in Asia and Latin America have resisted US bullying with far greater success. This underscores a broader reality: Europe’s structural subordination to the United States has reached a level unseen in the postwar era, and the EU itself has been the principal vehicle of this dependency.
By locking European nations into a supranational straitjacket, Brussels has deprived them of the sovereign tools — industrial policy, trade flexibility energy independence — needed to defend their own interests. Moreover, the EU has always been ideologically and strategically wedded to Atlanticism — and its progressive integration with NATO in recent years has only deepened this subordination to the US. This alignment has become embarrassingly apparent under von der Leyen.
As a result, far from making Europe “stronger together”, the EU has delivered an unprecedented loss of leverage and autonomy. The bloc now resembles the very thing it was supposed to overcome (at least according to its official mythos): a collection of vassal states, unable to chart an independent course and increasingly reduced to the role of Washington’s economic protectorate.
Finally, as I’ve written before, Trump is not entirely wrong when he accuses the EU of engaging in unfair trade practices. Over the past two decades, the EU has embraced a hyper-mercantilist, export-driven growth model — one that systematically suppresses domestic demand in order to bolster price competitiveness on the global stage while keeping imports low. In other words, it has consistently prioritised trade surpluses over internal economic development.
This model has come at a steep cost. European citizens have paid the price through stagnant wages, precarious employment and chronically underfunded public services. Meanwhile, the EU’s trading partners — most notably the United States — have been forced to absorb Europe’s ever-growing export surpluses, feeding an increasingly unbalanced global economic relationship.
A rebalancing was indeed long overdue. But this agreement represents the worst possible kind of rebalancing. Instead of using this moment as an opportunity to rethink its fundamentally flawed economic strategy — by raising European wages, boosting internal demand and accepting that exports might become less competitive as a result — the EU has doubled down on the very model that hollowed out its own economic resilience. Rather than shifting towards a healthier, more domestically-driven growth path, Brussels has chosen to preserve its export-led paradigm at all costs — even if that now means exposing Europe’s industrial base to a flood of imports, accelerating deindustrialisation and deepening its dependence on foreign markets.
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Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)
It's not a capitulation. It's vassalhood. This is the same EU had has cut itself off from cheap Russian gas purely to please the US, and has cut itself off from trade with Russia, as well as "decoupling" from China which should be Europe's target for exporting goods.
Remember as well the EU is also being led by the nose to fight Russia and China, which is NOT in the EU's interest either. So on all fronts, the EU is a self flaggellating puppet operated by the US fist inserted behind and inside it.
And the EU does not have leaders - it has vassal figureheads that are obviously managed directly from Langley, VA.
Question is when will it finally click for the massrs of fools in Europe who operate under the fictional belief that they have leaders and live in independent countries.
Sure thing.