Leverage: Trump Has it, and is Willing to Use it
As we all sit and marvel this morning at the one-sided nature of the trade deal President Donald Trump just struck with EU leader Ursula Von Der Leyen, we should understand that it is another in what has become a long line of reminders that, in these negotiations, Trump holds all the cards. Every bit of the leverage is his; he understands that reality; and, unlike every president before him, he is willing to use that leverage to advance the interests of the United States of America, and no one else.
More than any of the deals with other countries around the world which preceded it, this deal with the EU, which serves as the ideological center of the globalist world order symbolizes the reality that globalism is a dead ideology. The “new world order” envisioned and implemented by George HW Bush and advanced for more than 30 years by his successors in office is defunct.
The world order which has dominated the globe since the fall of the Soviet Union is now giving way to the pragmatic realism that every country which makes or produced goods for exports must have access to America’s enormous consumer market to have any hopes of growing its economy. Some of those countries, led by authoritarian despots like Brazil, South Africa, and Egypt, had pinned their hopes for growth on membership in the BRICS trading block, which became a rising force on the global stage during the years of Joe Biden’s feckless, globalist foreign policy.