The Final Move on the Chessboard
Trade wars, tariffs, and tantrums are all noise. The U.S. and Europe can win history tomorrow.
The more observant even among my very observant readers may have noticed that things are happening with Trump and tariffs.
I’ll frontload the entire post with the payload: The optimal outcome by far is completely free trade between the US and EU.
A US-EU free trade zone is the obvious and unstoppable answer to global power fragmentation. All the more-or-less hypothetical Dragonbears (China exploits Russia ruthlessly) and Chimericas (would only happen with a far-left American government) of various wet dream imaginations and cope-schemings-in-the-shadows pale in comparison to the potential of Atlantica.
We already came so very close.
If the EU and USA grow together, there is no more third-worldist mobster hope of a “multipolar world”, it is all decided. The West wins.
Chinese attempts to de-americanize global trade, painstakingly moving pieces on the chessboard one Congolese sea-port at a time get rug-pulled by Men of The West flipping the chessboard. They play Go in the jungle, we nuke the board from orbit.
A North-Atlantic Free Trade Zone is the lowest hanging and plumplest fruit on the planet, it only didn’t happen yet because of a bunch of sclerotic boomercorps on both sides of the ocean who’d rather cry to regulators than compete.
It is an orbital strike on a paleolithic javelin fight level of difference in kind. It dwarfs all would-be challengers in sheer economic and geopolitical potential, provided both EU and USA pull their heads out of their asses in some of their respective sticking points and cultural shortcomings. We can go over the details of that another time.
Conversely, genuine animosity would be a total disaster between the sister powers of USA and Europe. A wedge would cost us the world.
Regarding the current situation, in digestible bullet point format:
The status quo ante before Trump’s tariffs was not free trade, the situation is more akin to the big dog finally biting back. Usually, tariffs levied on America were higher than tariffs levied by America.
From an European perspective, I wouldn’t worry about American glyphosate-laden poison “food” and deathtrap crap cars flooding the European market. Tariffs are not the only form of trade barrier - many American products objectively do not meet the most basic quality and safety requirements in Europe. A regulatory harmonization is a goal further down the road.
MAGA talking points about Europe being a “freeloader” and somehow “benefitting” at “America’s expense” by selling it superior products are unmitigated retardation, and the complaints about defense arrangements are ignorant of America’s own grand strategy and stance towards Europe and Japan post-war, forgetting the current state of affairs was America’s own very much forcefully asserted policy - like an elderly relative with Alzheimer’s angrily shouting “who put this fucking thing here” when it was them five seconds ago. Americans are now dismantling their own empire to save pennies. The complaints about trade balances are basically “I bought a bagel from you and now you have my money, which means you exploited me”, a Marxist-woke reading of international trade. But then, a lot of MAGA is right-wing Marxism! The argument is literally “we bought your (vastly better) wine and cars, which means you owe us”. It is mental leftism that’s chafing against mutually beneficial free exchange, because they didn’t get to eat their cake and have it too, i.e. unilaterally exploit the counterparty without providing anything in exchange. Now they want their money back for goods and services they voluntarily bought and already happily consumed - they built the world order that allowed them to extract planetary tribute for three quarters of a century, and now they want a refund. Karen America.
The average MAGA enjoyer has roughly Joe Biden tier dementia on matters of trade relations and geopolitical history, blissfully and angrily unaware of anything, but feeling vaguely oppressed by his own imperial subjects. The current trade and defense arrangements with Europe and Japan weren’t American sacrifices, they were deliberate tools of American imperial architecture. Post-WWII, the U.S. set up a system where it would underwrite global security (via NATO and the Pacific umbrella) and in exchange, allies would accept American leadership, buy American debt, and submit to a unipolar world. Europe, as we know it, was midwifed by the CIA, which viewed supranational integration as a bulwark against both communism and resurgent nationalism. The EU is less a sovereign peer and more a well-fed client, a polished satrapy with good wine. Japan was allowed to thrive under the same logic: economic growth in exchange for total military dependence.
America declawed its friends, and now holds it against them. That entire structure - carrot-laden empire by consent - was America's idea. Now, some Americans, especially on the populist right, act as if this setup was imposed on them by cunning foreigners. They want to keep the fruits of empire (reserve currency, global trade access, allies as captive markets) without paying the relatively modest costs (forward bases, alliance diplomacy, a few aircraft carriers). It’s like inheriting a villa in Tuscany and complaining about having to sweep the floors. Empires don’t run themselves. If you want tribute, you have to maintain the roads - and make sure the other empires don’t invade your tributaries.
Americans believing policy factors are the only reason Europeans don’t drive their cars and eat their carcinogenic corn-syrup cheese is a woke cope reading of the situation: “I only fail because I am being oppressed, not because I am bad at the thing” No, you are bad at the thing, American cars are garbage (except Tesla), and American food is poison - just look at y'all’s Gas Giant tier waistlines. This is like Bulgarians being offended that very few of their wines are sold in Tuscany, while Tuscan wines dominate Bulgarian high-end restaurants. Well yeah, obviously! It’s called competition and the free market.
Steelman reading of the tariffs: 1) it is a negotiating tactic whose ultimate goal is to remove pre-existing trade barriers, via the unfailing expedient of “dread game” 2) it’s second purpose is to crash the yuan and cause a rout to US treasuries to refinance debt at more favorable interest rates - a necessary goal as the fiscal trajectory of America was unsustainable (as is Europe’s) - debt-driven models are slow suicide, bleeding life-force into the vampire squid of global finance in exchange for cosmetically massaged economic indicators in the present, and a continued all-inclusive resort economy for boomers (+ illegals).
One of the reasons we were told for decades that tariffs are never a good idea was that it benefited China and allowed commies to build a rival superpower.
Trump’s approach is radicalizing Blue Tribe America into wanting closer ties with Europe by negative polarization, which means Atlantica may happen within the decade by one route or the other. It’s now the confluent scenario of both Red Tribe coming around to sanity and Blue Tribe reaction.
Red Tribe (MAGA) clamoring for factory jobs is romanticism as delusional as the left’s noble-savage fetish for hunter-gatherers. Incredibly, they now demand worse jobs and pricier goods—just to own the libs. Backbreaking toaster-assembly-line work is the new ten acres and a barefoot, pregnant blonde feeding chickens in the right-wing hippie imagination. It’s obviously all a LARP. The common denominator? None of them have been within a parsec of the life they’re fetishizing. If they had, they’d understand why everyone who actually lived it clawed their way out at the first opportunity.
Caveat emptor: more manufacturing jobs in a free country typically means more powerful unions, which means Marxist co-opting of such, which means no more free country. Let it be a warning that even America’s pampered knowledge workers doing fuck all in some tech giant for $500,000 a year are feeling oppressed, starting unions and talking about Revolution, while being the least-hard-working, most privileged people in all of human history. Now imagine what people who aren’t LARPing bourgies and actually have a claim to being working class will do if they grow in numbers. A return of manufacturing jobs would likely add a significant Old Left faction into America’s already unimaginably fucked political landscape. This would very much make you miss the blue-haired, mentally ill, cruel and unusual genders play-acting communism from their parents’ waterfront villas in Seattle.
Atlantica is the obvious, final move on the chessboard. It is the move that ends the game. No more multipolar LARPing, no BRICS wet dreams - just the final evolution of the Western project into something so economically and culturally dominant that history actually ends. It is the obvious path, the easiest win condition ever laid on the table. And yet here we are, watching heirs of declining empire cosplay peasants, demanding worse jobs and shittier products to spiritually avenge a 1970s steel mill that their grandpa fucking hated. The Men of the West could flip the chessboard and walk off with the prize - all it takes is remembering that it’s ours, and always has been.