EU-US ties: Undoing Donald Trump's trade war [not his war]

US President Joe Biden is in Europe as he looks to reset ties with traditional American allies. Trans-Atlantic relations had become increasingly tense during his predecessor’s term, thanks in part to tariffs that Donald Trump slapped on billions worth of European goods.

Biden and European Union leaders will on Tuesday commit to ending trade disputes related to aluminum, steel and aircraft, according to a draft communiqué ahead of the US-EU summit.

The draft spells out that the two sides will commit to end the nearly two-decade old Boeing-Airbus dispute before July 11 and lift punitive tariffs related to the steel and aluminum trade dispute by December 1. […]

The Trump administration used Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 — a Cold War relic seldom used before it became the president’s weapon of choice — that allowed the US to impose tariffs or other trade restrictions on trading partners on national security grounds. Trump said the EU’s “unfair” trade policies were jeopardizing the existence of critical US industries, and threatened duties on the European auto industry on similar grounds.

The response from the EU, which described the move as “protectionism, pure and simple,” was swift and severe. It retaliated by imposing tariffs on €2.8 billion ($3.39 billion) worth of US goods like jeans, bourbon whiskey, peanut butter, orange juice and motorcycles. …

The entire European Union has aged into a demographic collapse. They do not have enough consumers to consume the products they produce. This means there can never be a US trade surplus with the EU. After the cold war, the US patrolled the global oceans with our navy, and opened up the US market to the goods of our allies, so they could export their way back to solvency. But this solvency came at the expense of the American worker...which, over time was taken as a given. Globalization was a moment in time when everything more or less worked...but the moment is over. Most of the rest of the world is in demographic collapse. They don’t have the younger consumers and workers needed to keep their economies at the level they were used to. Also, they all became socialist, giving away lots of benefits that they can no longer afford. Trump changed the rules and now Biden is trying to get back to what the world’s economy looked like years ago. But the EU can’t let the US sell products over there as they make more than enough to have and to export. Also, US products, without the socialist tax burden, are better deals.

Turning the clock back to the way it was will be a double-whammy to the American economy.

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