Trump's Tariffs and those Goddamned Freeloading Europeans

A brief primer on why the American empire exists, how it works, and Europe's place in it.

A sheep noble sheep, unperturbed by solitude.

Whenever I talk about things like tariffs, Trump supporters appear in my comments to tell me that Europe has gotten a free ride for long enough and that it is time we learned to pay our way. I find it a little frustrating to read this, because in Europe it does not feel like we are getting a free ride at all. In fact it seems like the opposite: The most common complaint on the populist German right is that our political class refuses to represent our interests and will not stop carrying water for the Americans.

I recognise that I’ll never be able to put this right, but it’s worth trying, because it is important to understand the world as it is. The truth is that the United States is an imperial power. Generally speaking, it does not give foreign nations free rides and it does not hand out unearned favours. There is however a lot of confusion here, because hardly anybody bothers to describe honestly the geopolitical strategy pursued by the United States or the nature of the American empire. Western liberalism cannot conceptualise imperial politics, and while empire generally benefits political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, it is not necessarily or always in the interests of ordinary Americans or ordinary Europeans, which is yet another reason not to talk about it.

The Americans and the British before them expended enormous effort to preempt the emergence of a dominant power on the European Continent that might challenge their successive naval empires. They fought two world wars to stop Germany from becoming just such a power. This great struggle ended in 1945 with Western Europe as a fully subjugated imperial province. Since then, the Americans have coordinated the NATO alliance and guaranteed the security of European countries not out of charity, but because Europe is their provincial possession. As a rule, they have not wanted Europe to assume full responsibility for its own defence, because a world in which America no longer guarantees the security of Europe is a world in which Europe is no longer an American province. It’s that simple.

To fend off the Soviets, the Americans nevertheless rebuilt and rearmed the nations of Western Europe. Everyone involved in this project had to come up with a way to allow the Germans to become a dominant economic power again, without displacing the United States or provoking the hostilities of wary postwar neighbours like France. One solution here was the European Union, which promoted economic interdependency as a counterweight to nationalist concerns. Another solution came at the cultural level, where Germany sought to allay European anxieties over possible Teutonic aggression by developing a national cult of historical guilt for World War II, which steadily blossomed into a full-blown civic religion. This exercise in self-effacement has grown more and not less extreme over time, in part as a response to nervousness about the consequences of German reunification. Many voices on the right like to portray Germans as victims of an externally imposed guilt regime, but the truth is that we did most of this to ourselves. The German left in particular has profited from and encouraged this mindset from the beginning.

German political self-effacement had one unexpected feature, in that it proved to be contagious. Within a generation of 1945, many of the victorious allied powers were striving to develop their own historical guilt cults after the German example, in each case centred around a national original sin like slavery or colonialism. Just as the German political class found it expedient to foreground collective European concerns at the expense of a more narrowly construed German nationalism, so did the broader West develop an overarching obsession with global issues and the plight of the developing world. This has caused the proliferation of a lot of silly people in our political culture, a lot of profoundly stupid organisations, and at least two cancerous ideological systems in the form of climatism and migrationism. We have had a nearly incalculable gift in the form of 80 years of peace, which may yet be offset by the equally incalculable costs of the lunacies this peace has encouraged.

Trump’s greatest geopolitical ambition is to reorient American foreign policy away from Europe and the minor rivalry with Russia, towards East Asia and the far greater rivalry with China. This pivot entails a demotion of provincial Europe in the pecking order of empire. The Americans will want Europeans to pay more for their place in the broader imperial system, and they will be inclined to extend the Europeans fewer benefits. That is what a lot of the low-resolution MAGA rhetoric about free-riding Europeans adds up to, it is the meaning of Trump’s demands that European nations massively increase NATO spending, and it has been an important subtext in the tariff negotiations too. So far, NATO member states and the EU have folded to Trump’s demands with very little resistance, despite their extravagance.

The truth is that we could fund our own defence for less than 5% of our collective GDP, but this is as yet unthinkable, because European independence would spell the end of our present system. Basically, there can be no united Europe without the Americans. If and when the Americans leave, some European nations will pursue closer trade relations with Russia; others will oppose them in this. It has been four generations since any major European nation plotted an independent geopolitical agenda; the very idea is a nightmare for our rulers, and many of the resulting alliances would remind people of unfortunate early 20th-century geopolitical configurations. This is primarily why European leaders have developed such a fanatical obsession with the war in Ukraine. For the moment, the conflict defines Russia as an external threat and suppresses all discussions about the different national interests of EU member states. It is yet another way for Germany’s political class to practice their conventional self-effacement in favour of notional pan-European interests.

As in many other cases, Trump’s policies with respect to Europe represent the culmination of forces and trends that are much bigger than his presidency. The era of unchallenged American global hegemony is over with, and in this environment being a province of the American empire will just become a steadily worse deal for Europe as a whole.