President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs – duties on imports – have brought recriminations and specific threats by most nations. Notably, the European Union has struck a decidedly mild tone. “What’s important here is that Europe reacts in a calm and measured way,” Irish Foreign Minister Simon Harris said. Britain, an EU member until 2020, said it, too, would negotiate calmly with Washington.
For the EU, the stakes in a trade war with the United States would not be low. But its mild reaction so far comes from a need to navigate the divergent interests of 27 member countries. Patient listening and consensus-making are the only options.
That can be infuriating for some. The bloc’s bureaucracy can be a faceless force, binding energy and ideas in endless process. But recent weeks have shown the flip side. Europe didn’t react precipitously to the Trump tariffs because it first needed to deliberate.
France wanted to get tough on the U.S. but not cause damage to its best exports. Everyone was eager to put pressure on American Big Tech, except Ireland, which houses the European headquarters of most of these firms. And Italy, whose prime minister is a strong ally of Mr. Trump, didn’t want to do much at all.
Each country knows that it is far stronger together than alone. For example, “EU countries typically have a hundred times more leverage over China when acting through the EU than when acting bilaterally,” noted a study by the Mercator Institute for China Studies. The EU’s unity has held so far because “A shared commercial policy remains in everyone’s interest,” a European diplomat told Reuters.
Mr. Trump once co-penned a book called “The Art of the Deal.” The EU’s superpower is “the art of compromise,” wrote Jan Voßwinkel on the Common Ground of Europe blog. That means being open to letting good ideas float to the top through respectful and informed deliberation.
The EU “has been successful because it takes a very long-term view,” Dr. Voßwinkel said. At its best, it helps member states “constantly search for ‘common ground’ and find compromises in the spirit of shared values.”
