Trump won a significant victory for his tariff policy over the EU, underlining the political bankruptcy of liberal centrist politicians in Europe and Britain, argues Kevin Crane

Things have been going badly at home for the USA’s far-right president for the past few weeks, particularly regarding his increasingly bizarre and frantic attempts to manage away the scandal regarding millionaire paedophile Jeffery Epstein. That controversy has been particularly satisfying, because it has caused a rift between Donald Trump and his mass base in the so-called ‘Make America Great Again’ (Maga) movement. Unfortunately, that divide may now start to heal, because Trump is able to return to his supporters with one of the first confirmed wins of his presidency, and the first real success of his signature tariff policies: he has used tariffs to batter the European Union into submission.

Despite the fact that this outcome was achieved in Scotland (and therefore, of course, not inside the Union itself) both the nature and scale of the US/EU trade deal have been severely underreported in the British press. This is definitely not true of the media in EU countries, where it has been front-page news everywhere, for all the wrong reasons.

Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European commission, has been desperately trying to put a positive spin on the deal, which sees America put a 15% tariff on a raft of goods that Europe has been relying on exporting to the USA, with very few exceptions. This means that the US government is heavily taxing its own people and businesses for carrying out said imports, hugely reducing American demand for most goods which businesses in the EU produce. On top of this, the Union has also agreed that its member governments will invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the USA, including $750b in fossil fuels and $600b on weapons. 

What do the peoples of the United Europe get in return for this? Well, nothing much. Tariffs are not being applied to American exports to EU, so there’s no counter-pressure placed on goods going East across the ocean: American business will have the same freedom to sell to Europeans even though the opposite isn’t true. This is essentially a loaded and biased agreement, openly seeking to enrich American interests at European expense.

Von der Leyen has claimed that the deal was the ‘best we could get’, as Trump had been threatening, and her fellow German politicians are largely towing that line. Other politicians have been quick to disagree with her, however. French European Minister, Benjamin Haddad, dismissed the deal as an unbalanced quick fix. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban (who is ironically an ultranationalist often cited as an influence on Trump), snarled that it was no agreement at all and that the President ‘ate von der Leyen for breakfast’.

The money markets could leave no-one in any doubt about which side of this debate traders and financiers were coming down on: European stock markets lost value hard, as did the Euro currency, while US markets soared upwards. The signs for Maga supporters are very clear: their leader just won them a huge victory, and people in another continent are paying for it.

A failure of liberalism 

Trump’s jaunt through the Old World has given him plenty more opportunities to belittle and bully others. Some of you may have seen the joint press conference in which he gleefully turned to Keir Starmer and instructed him to just stop talking, whilst Starmer desperately tried to ramble through a speech about how there were no disagreements between their two countries. The look on the British prime minister’s face said everything. He is, after all, used to playing the bully not the victim.

But there’s more to it than that: Starmer knows that he is now in a ridiculous position, as are the majority of liberal politicians in European countries, of having to bend the knee to a man they had all been dismissing as a joke less than a decade ago. 

Britain isn’t directly impacted by the EU deal, because of the Brexit vote, which coincidentally occurred in 2016, the same year Trump first got elected to the White House. At the time, the narrative from the liberal centre both in Britain and the rest of the continent was that these two phenomenon represented the same ‘populist’ threat, and that what was needed was a return to the moderate, sensible values supposedly represented by the European Union. When current president of France, Emanuel Macron, was elected the following year, he was being hailed as a sort of liberal strong man who represented the ‘anti-populist’ alternative. Meanwhile, in Britain, centrist politicians and public figures organised a large, noisy movement to demand the overturn of the Brexit referendum: Keir Starmer was a key figure within that project.

The liberal vision of resistance to populism couldn’t ring hollower than it does now. The French government may moan, but Macron is still president, and he couldn’t save France from this terrible trade agreement. Starmer has long since forgotten his opposition to Brexit and he and his government, particularly the pathetic foreign minister David Lammy, now have to rave about how happy they are working with a man they used to mock as a stupid bigot on Twitter. Much more than any of that, the European Union itself has been exposed as being completely ineffective at either opposing Trump’s general political movement or protecting European people from his policies.

The failure of the European liberal centre is made even worse, and way more embarrassing, because far from facing a Donald Trump who was coming at them after a massive worldwide winning streak, they are basically the only people whom Trump has defeated to this extent. From Latin America, through Canada and Australia, to much of the of the rest of the world, governments (with all sorts of different political orientations) have shown that they can stand up to Trump and obtain significant support from their own people in doing so. One of the few exemptions in the US/EU deal for tariffs is for European steel, and that’s only there because Canada and Mexico didn’t capitulate so completely, forcing Trump to be flexible on that one issue!

This defeat belongs to European political elites, and those elites need to face the consequences of it. As we look towards the creation of a new left in Britain, we need to understand and talk about what happened in Scotland this week, and how some return to the pre-2016 political order is not the solution here. Trump wants people in Europe to get poorer to help his friends get richer and drive ever onwards to more militarism and more war: we need a real resistance to that, not the false one that was promised by supporters of European Union.