So it is. Trump without mercy for the Union. 30% rate for all EU goods and threat of severe retaliation in case of any response.
Ursula Von Der Leyen makes a good face for a bad game, but the situation is bad, and it can shortly become tragic.
Why?
The deficiency of Trump's mercy means the ball is now on China's side.
If those at the upcoming EU-China summit in Beijing Monday scope Europe, we will end up as China's junior partner at best.
This will origin a severe shock to liberal Polish elites and pro-Trumpian conservatives, as a script not in the head.
But let us leave our national backyard due to the fact that it is about the trade federation of 27 countries (including Poland) and not our ideas about the planet that long ago disappeared.
Especially since there's a tragic script on the table. They can be humiliating (a amazing surprise of Poles) prostrate Europeans, and Beijing will not draw out this supporting hand of Europe anyway.
Because he'll think it's not adequate that he doesn't get paid, or that he doesn't have to, or that he doesn't want to do concessions and save Europeans, due to the fact that they're in their own planet anyway, and they won't even notice.
Or that at least as much, if no more can be achieved by pressing and exerting force than "defeating global trade" and entering into agreements with Europe, which over the last decades has treated China in advance and criticized almost everything (or at least this is frequently the feeling of Chinese elites).
Last but not least Beijing will not shake hands for any another reason. And not only due to the fact that he won't, but due to the fact that he won't, or he won't, due to the fact that he himself feels the multifaceted force of an era of end-of-globalization and customs wars.
And if any of the above occurs and the chances are above 50% in my opinion, then we'll be in the ticks between Trump and Beijing. Again in our favourite "crush zone." As a dish at a power concert.
This time, the plus for Poland, that we will land on Titanic in good company, possibly even in the first class cabin, together with the nations that we admire and have been inspiring ourselves for respective 100 years, trying to equal them.
But this does not change the fact that customs attacks on both sides mean commercial-customs, industrial, technological and possibly besides civilizational "dosinating European Packs".
Of course, it will begin to calm down that the seventh time we can sign a free trade agreement with India, that Mercosur is about to open (although there is no consensus among the associate States about ratification) that there is ASEAN, markets of the global south, etc., etc., and that it is not even possible to compose that, due to the fact that it is sowing panic and "colporting the narratives of authoritarian states" including Putin.
But the fact is, ladies and gentlemen, that this 30% of Trump's duties may be to push Europe into the arms of China, or to get it (for Polish intelligents it is 1 and the same).
If anyone has any more hopes and illusions, let them hold their fingers to the cold blood of the EU negotiators (although there was blood in them/herself that was adequate time to prepare for it better and avoid "alternativeness").
Because now it's either Trump's gonna change his head in a fewer days and say he's joking or something's gonna end up very violently.
And it will not be the Hollywood happy ending, alternatively the ending unworthy of the Polish intelligent.
(by Radosław Pyffel)
