From Union to Eunuch: How Trump fixed EU’s spine problem

FILE PHOTO: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. © Omar Havana / Getty Images

by RT [7-30-2025 published].

(RAD: After ignoring this headline several times, I finally decided to take a quick look to see what it might be about. It turns out that there are a lot of lessons to be learned from this fiasco.

Let's start with the high tariffs that will be paid on products imported from Europe to the US. Trump keeps selling this as though Europe is paying these tariffs & that it doesn't adversely affect US customers. This is FALSE. If individual products are still imported into the US, that tariff is a TAX paid by US customers because the price of the products must rise in the US to cover the cost of the tariffs. When faced with these high tariffs, many products will no longer be imported from Europe. I personally know of a company that had placed an order for a piece of equipment costing $1million that is only made in Italy that would have made their business more efficient. Because of Trump's high EU tariffs, they had to cancel the order. In effect, Trump has 'screwed' both Europe & the US citizens while trying to sell it to us as a good 'deal' for us.

This next point is discussed by the author, yet I want to highlight some obvious takeaways.

For a 'deal' to be considered 'good' it MUST be perceived by both sides as good, else it usually ends in a variety of disasters. Based upon his real estate business background, IF Trump had been in the EU's position, he would have walked away because he would have known that this was a disaster. If Trump was an honest broker, he would not have gone through with such an unbalanced bad 'deal'.

Europe is already financially broke. Therefore, the amount of money Europe will invest in the US from this 'deal' is a fantasy. Likewise, Europe can't afford to pay for all of the LNG. Asking Europe to spend more money on Ukraine to fight Russia is worse than poring money down the toilet, since there is no possible way that Europe & Ukraine can win against Russia that has already won, although Ukraine, Europe & the US aren't willing to acknowledge this reality.

On a global scale, what Trump has done to Europe will help accelerate cooperation among the BRICS nations and further isolate the US. Trump's cherished $dollar reserve currency is already vanishing. Notice that Russia, China, Iran are taking a hard line & standing up against the bully tactics of the US. Other BRICS nations are taking notice and making adjustments in their relationships to the US. I don't think Trump & his neocons appreciate how bad this will be for the US over the long haul. As the cost of living continues to rise & the value of the $dollar goes down, more & more people in the US are going to rebel.

Although this next point isn't mentioned in the article, it needs to be highlighted. Since Europe is essentially broke, they don't have a strong military, & they didn't have the fortitude to stand up & seriously tell the US to 'pound sand', it should be obvious to everyone that there is no way that they can stand up & win anything against the Russian battle-hardened military. Besides, most citizens of Europe want a better standard of living & don't want to fight Russia.

When I went back to grad school to get my MBA, there were many 'case studies' of real world situations that we had to analyze. This Trump 'deal' has many elements of what to do & what not to do if you want to be successful in the long run & have a good reputations whereby clients like working with you & trust you. — RAD)

The Washington-Brussels tariff ‘deal’ is unconditional surrender without a war.

Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian and expert on international politics. He has a BA in Modern History from Oxford University, an MSc in International History from the LSE, and a PhD in History from Princeton University. He has held scholarships at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and directed the Center for Urban History in Lviv, Ukraine. Originally from Germany, he has lived in the UK, Ukraine, Poland, the USA, and Turkey. His book 'The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists' was published by Cornell University Press in 2015. A study of the political and cultural history of Cold War television spy stories is about to appear, and he is currently working on a new book on the global response to the war in Ukraine. He has given interviews on various programs, including several on Rania Khlalek Dispatches, Breakthrough News.

In history, some things become clear only in hindsight. For instance, German unification all over again – good thing or bad thing? That jury is still out.

At this point, it looks as if we’ll soon look back with regrets from yet another very bleak postwar situation to ponder that question. But there are also things that are obvious from the moment they start happening. For example, Israel and the West’s Gaza genocide, no matter that many talking heads now pretend they’ve only just noticed.

Something else that’s as in-your-face obvious as a concrete wall you’ve just run into is that the EU has just suffered a catastrophic, crippling defeat. As usual with America’s European vassals, the defeat is strange.

First, it has been inflicted not by an enemy, but by an “ally” and big-brother-in-“values”: This is the moment the NATO-EU underlings are falling over each other to keep paying for the US-instigated and failing proxy war in Ukraine while also building the equivalent of a dozen new Maginot Lines (this time including a “drone wall”) against the big, bad Russians. Yet it is Washington that has struck its eager-to-please sycophants in the back. The EU has also done its very worst to assist in its own trouncing. As Trump retainer Sebastian Gorka – himself, ironically, a European slavishly serving the US empire – has correctly put it, Europe has “bent the knee.” And once it was all over, with the blood not yet dry on the floor, the EU picked itself up, dusted off its pantsuit and said thank you, in the best tradition of German chancellors who grin and scrape when American presidents tell them they will “put an end” to Germany’s vital infrastructure.

We are talking, of course, about the so-called tariff and trade “deal” just concluded at the Scottish luxury golf resort of Turnberry, between the US, under self-declared “tariff man” and elected, if by very messy rules, President Donald Trump (also owner of that golf resort) and the EU represented – no one really knows on the basis of what mandate – by the pristinely unelected head of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. The same one who promised us a “geopolitical” Commission and EU. If this is your “geopolitics,” it’s suicidal.

It was a bloody affair, but we can’t even call it the “Battle of Turnberry” because there was no fight before the EU went down. The gist of what really was an economic massacre is simple. After months of negotiations, seven trips to Washington and over 100 hours of empty talk by its touchingly useless trade commissioner Maros Sefcovic alone, the EU has brought home not a bad deal but pure, total defeat, as if it had been busy distilling the very essence of being on the losing side at Cannae, Waterloo, and Stalingrad: While Trump could enumerate a substantial list of big, expensive concessions made by the Europeans, von der Leyen got nothing, strictly nothing. This is not a “deal” at all. It is unconditional surrender. Without a preceding war.

In essence, the US will now levy “baseline” tariffs of 15% on most of its massive imports from the EU, including on cars. But there are exceptions! Already punitive American tariffs of 50% on steel and aluminum will remain in place. In return, for the US, selling in the giant if decaying EU market will be, in essence, free, at an average tariff rate of zero or, at best, below 1%.

And to show its appreciation of such a fine, evenhanded “deal,” the EU sweetened it by throwing in some extras as if there is no tomorrow. Like at one of those late-night TV direct sales shows. Only that the EU slogan is not “order immediately and…” but “ruin us right now and get an extra $1.35 trillion just to make us even poorer and you even richer!”

That $1.35 trillion consists of two promises of direct EU tributes (yes, that is the correct, real term) to Washington: an additional – as Trump stressed – $600 billion which EU companies, surely dizzy with gratitude, will invest in the US; and $750 billion of especially dirty and expensive American LNG (liquefied natural gas) which they will buy to feed into whatever will remain of European industry.

Meanwhile, Trump is making concessions – again – to China. China, of course, being the sovereign country and economic powerhouse that did what the EU completely failed to do: fight back against the Washington bullies. And now imagine what the EU could have achieved if it had worked with China to check US aggression. Instead, the recent EU-China summit in Beijing has shown that the EU is still not ready to abandon its arrogant stance of hectoring and threatening China, in particular in a futile attempt to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow. The other thing the summit has made clear is that China will not budge. And why would it?

The absurdity of all of the above is staggeringly obvious, even if there already are quarrels about the details. Because between Team Trump and Team von der Leyen, two card-carrying egomaniacs and narcissists, there was of course no one to take care of those. Regal von der Leyen – with aristocratic nonchalance – besides, never cared to check if she even has a right or the practical means to promise away $1.35 trillion that, actually, only specific companies could make available. Hint: she does not.

But what does it all mean? Here are three take-away points:

First, we must, for once, agree with American regime change and war addicts, such as Anne Applebaum and Tim Snyder: European appeasement is a real thing. But not of Russia, which has never been appeased but provoked, needlessly fought, and, mostly, systematically denied even a fair hearing. No, what the Europeans appease is, obviously, the US, their ruthless and utterly contemptuous hegemon and worst enemy, from letting America and its cut-outs blow up Nord Stream to the Turnberry Fiasco.

Look at the feeble official attempts to sell this exploitation and devastation pact with Washington to the European public: German Chancellor Friedrich Merz – only recently the undeserving recipient of exorbitant praise at home simply for not having been humiliated too crassly at the Trump White House – has officially thanked the EU negotiators, especially Sefcovic and von der Leyen, and praised the “deal” for averting an even worse outcome and providing “stability.” Likewise, von der Leyen has praised herself for giving us “certainty in uncertain times.”

What a channeling of Neville Chamberlain, the interwar British premier who gave appeasement its bad name by caving in to Hitler! Dear Tim Snyder: We know, for you it’s always 1938 somewhere. Here you have a full re-enactment: “Certainty for our time!” von der Leyen virtually shouted raising not an umbrella but her thumb, while still at the American leader’s golf club Berghof in Scotland.

Second, there goes the new German “Fuhrungsmacht” (meaning leadership, and with extra oomph). And we hardly ever knew it. Because – pay attention now, Berlin – here’s the catch: One cannot claim leadership in Europe and initiate full self-destruct mode just to please the US at the same time. I know, this is complicated. But people just don’t like being led by those who sell them out.

In this regard, it is, of course, important that it will be two Germans, von der Leyen and Merz, who will be most associated with the Turnberry Fiasco. They have made sure that Germany does not stand for leadership but for submission to the point of self-harm. The rhetoric of collaboration – “We are betraying your interests only to avoid even worse things, please be grateful!” – will either not work at all or not for long. In the end, it’s the De Gaulles who win, not the Petains.

Third, there is a difference between a trade war and economic warfare. Merz may claim that a trade war with the US has been avoided. In reality, we will never know, of course: If the EU had stood its ground – and it had the means and even some plans to do so – there might not even have been a trade war or it might have ended quickly, and with a better outcome for the EU. China, again, is the proof.

But one thing is certain: there is ongoing economic warfare, namely by the US against its own European vassals. They have submitted to their own impoverishment and ongoing deindustrialization, but the American laying waste of their economies has not stopped but accelerated again. Europe is under massive economic attack – and it is not fighting back.

In an ideal world, the Europeans would now finally see sense: For starters, they would rebel against the EU Commission and its power grab, get rid of Ursula von der Leyen and her team, and disavow their “deal.”

Then they would stop taking over America’s proxy war against Russia, cut their ties with the corrupt Kiev regime, and normalize their relationship with Russia – and with China, too. In other words, they would find partners to help them emancipate themselves from an American overlord that is not merely dominating but devastating its “allies.”

None of the above, however, will happen. Witness the sorry spectacle of the last, recent attempt to chase von der Leyen from office. Real change to save Europe from the EU will require tectonic shifts in the continent’s politics. Indeed, the EU is probably hopeless and will have to be abandoned first. Europe’s current “elites,” who behave as if they serve the US and not their fellow Europeans, will have to lose power. But how? In late 1916, a Russian politician gave a famous speech. Enumerating the then tsarist government’s failures, he kept asking the same simple question: “Is this stupidity or treason?” Less than half a year after that speech, Russia’s Ancien Regime fell. Europeans must wake up at long last and ask the same question about their leaders.

Pepe Escobar – Chinese foxes, American sharks, European rodents [7-31-2025]

EU ‘bent the knee’ before Trump – White House [7-29-2025]

US tariffs to cost German car giants over €10bn – study [7-28-2025]

Trump ate von der Leyen for breakfast – Orban [7-28-2025]

Trump’s tariffs to cost global economy $2 trn – Bloomberg [7-28-2025]