You Can't Quit America

New York Times

6 days ago

This week, the European Union agreed to a trade deal with the United States that amounts to a capitulation to Donald Trump.
Yes, Trump had already made certain concessions in advance, by pre-emptively walking back his outrageous opening gambit in the tariff war when markets rebelled against the policy. 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, the president of the European Commission, sealed with Trump is part of this new normal, in which most 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.
There is a hard lesson here, not just for observers hoping for a more muscular European trade policy, 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 potential political escape from populism, with liberal culture 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.
The first thing they understand is that American economic power is just too big to escape or isolate or ignore. Before Trump's 2024 victory the economic story was one in which American growth 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 market from rising and the American growth machine from churning onward.
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