Maybe Europe should follow the example of China, the only nation to force Trump into a serious capitulation in his second term. Beijing wielded its dominance over rare earth minerals, which power the US tech industry, to force him to suspend his trade war with China.
Europe might be a military paper tiger. But, with the US, it’s one half of the world’s biggest trade relationship. Millions of American jobs in a US economy that’s giving Trump political trouble may rely on European trade.
“Inevitably, if Donald Trump persists, a showdown is necessary,” France’s top newspaper, Le Monde, wrote in an editorial. “Donald Trump seems to respect only those who stand up to him. The European Union does not lack weapons, provided it finally decides to use them.”
A descent into a full-blow trade war with reciprocal US tariffs could be a disaster for both sides and might finish off NATO.
But if it needs to hurt Trump, Europe may have no choice… Will Europe really follow through?
Thoughts? Should Europe add tariffs to US trade to hurt the US economy, hoping it will make Trump back down over Greenland, even if this means economic pain for Europe?
It’s not the rare earth thing that China used - they literally talked about it in their media a few times.
They simply paraded a economic atomic bomb around wallstreet enough that these guys got scared enough and called Donnie (might even be the real reason Musk and him had a fallout) - who in term tried to persuade the Arabs to help him out if the PRC would pull the trigger.
Whaf economic bomb? The bonds and, to a far lesser degree, shares. The PRC owns around 682 billion dollars in US bonds. Combined with currency reserves (around 1.5-2 Trillion USD) and other similar things it is expected to wield a total market power of around 3 trillion USD. Even putting 20% of these on the market with a “we don’t care about the losses,motherfucker” directive would ruin the US econmy for a decade in possible domino effects.
The funny things? In terms of bonds China is not even that big - Japan has almost twice that, the UK has 888 Billion. Even Belgium has around 400 billion of US bonds.
In other words: If Europe would finally get their shit together and parade it’s own,much larger, economic H-bomb ready AND would make it clear that they would be willing to use it Donnie would still pout,but do much less. But of course…we don’t. Germany has a wallstreet manager as a chancellor, Macron is on it’s way out, Meloni is in bed with him, etc.
This will literally lead to European lifes being lost at some point.