Douthat: EU trade deal reveals the peerless power of America’s economy

The European Union transaction deal with the United States amounts to a capitulation to President Donald Trump Yes Trump had already made certain concessions in advance by preemptively walking back his outrageous opening gambit in the tariff war when markets rebelled against the approach But since that walk-back the president has enjoyed a run of victories establishing a new base line for U S tariff revenue with minimal retaliation from our trading partners The deal that Ursula von der Leyen president of the European Commission sealed with Trump on July is part of this new normal in which majority countries appear willing to pay extra for access to our markets and it s not America but the rest of the world that seems to be chickening out Related Articles Letters California must rethink its circumstances mishap response Trump removes official overseeing jobs information after dismal employment document Economic upswing sprouts on multiple fronts in downtown San Jose record shows Filipino supermarket Seafood City opens first branch in Daly City US job upsurge stalls Just jobs added in July with stunning downward revisions to latest months There is a hard lesson here not just for observers hoping for a more muscular European bargain protocol but also for anyone who has spent the early months of the second Trump administration imagining that a populist-governed United States might somehow end up isolated on the world stage This fantasy of isolation has been a source of both comfort and schadenfreude for anti-Trump liberals since it offers a vision of prospective political escape from populism with liberal heritage reconstituted in Toronto or Oxford or Scandinavia and a vision of a Trumpian America suffering economic punishment as its walls rise higher and the rest of the world prospers through mutual exchange But both conceits a world economic order that isolates America and a liberal order that continues on without us are fundamental misreadings of the global situation which the foreign leaders who have bowed to Trump s demands seem to understand quite clearly Too big to ignore The first thing they understand is that American economic power is just too big to escape or isolate or ignore Before Trump s mastery the economic story was one in which American advancement was clearly pulling away from our peer economies in Europe and East Asia Since Trump s return to power the economic story is one in which even protectionist policies that almost every economist deplores haven t prevented the American stock area from rising and the American increase machine from churning onward Moreover even if Trump reverts to deeper folly and causes a recession the forces favoring the United States over Germany or Britain or South Korea or Japan will still be present in the next administration and beyond Almost all of our liberal-democratic peers are poorer than we are and too sclerotic to suddenly surge past us There is just no booming youthful dynamic entrepreneurial zone capable of taking the place of America in a framework of free economies and therefore no substitute for business with our companies and access to our markets even at a Trumpian price There is of module the People s Republic of China which is strong enough to stand up to Trump s bullying and dynamic enough to stand as a counterweight to American economic might But unless your country is already authoritarian and not necessarily even then the risks of throwing yourself fully into China s orbit are still much more extreme than the costs of managing a populist administration in Washington This doesn t mean other countries won t end up trading more with China because of American protectionism But there is no plausible world where China exclusively replaces the United States as a trusted partner and pillar of globalization Here the economic story links up with the political one If it s implausible to imagine a grid of European and Asian economies prospering without the American leviathan it s even less plausible to imagine several kind of liberal world order reconstituting itself separately from the United States In part this is about hard power A liberal world order consisting of Western Europe and Canada would not be an order but an impotent anachronism Even as the post-Cold War order fades away and America s leader boasts about acting purely in self-interest the United States is still called upon to mediate conflicts between India and Pakistan or Cambodia and Thailand or Congo and Rwanda even as it continues to supply weaponry that protects Taiwan and staves off defeat for Ukraine No liberal alternative Should American power retreat fully from that role there is no liberal successor waiting in the wings And the concessions made to Trump by NATO members on military spending targets like the European Union s pact concessions reflect an awareness of this reality in which it s unfailingly better to help prop up the Pax Americana than to seek to build a post-American system But the other crucial political point is that the dilemma of liberalism is general not specific to the United States and there is no obvious expat refuge from the ideological conflicts of our age For now Trump s Man of Destiny has given American populism a special power but it s not as if liberalism is resilient or thriving in Europe or East Asia while it decays in the United States Populism already rules in Italy and Hungary it might govern France and Britain soon it is rising in Germany and Japan and South Korea have their own forms of post-liberal polarization At the same time Western progressivism has its own obvious illiberal features European countries under notionally liberal governments are busy suppressing free expression and sometimes democracy itself and the tensions of multiculturalism may make the European order more unstable than our own And both radicalism and reaction on the continent show a distinct American imprint our anti-racist jargon spread fast to Britain and the Conservative Political Action Conference now pops up in Poland and Hungary indicating that our cultural influence may be resilient whichever way the Europeans tilt Over the years I have known both left-wing and right-wing Americans who have decamped from our country for what seem like more politically congenial situations escaping wokeness in Eastern Europe escaping Trumpism in Canada or Britain My suggestion to these friends has been consistent Whatever your ideals or fears whatever your beliefs about the good society the battles you care about will be won or lost in the United States The refuges are illusory the alternatives are compromised or weak and the future of freedom will be American or it will not be at all Ross Douthat is a New York Times columnist