On "Forbes Newsroom", Fellow at the European Foreign Relations Council, Liana Fix, discusses how Europe can navigate through the ongoing discussions between the United States and China over trade and tariffs.
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00:00It's interesting that you talk about that confusion on the part of allies, because I had a conversation the other week with someone in the context of U.S.-Russia relations, and is the global order shifting was part of our conversation.
00:16We have seen President Trump in his first and second terms speak rather derisively of NATO, and I wonder about your perspective on this question. Is the global West not really a cohesive West anymore, and is that perhaps contributing to this confusion on the trade front?
00:35Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's this idea that Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping can kind of divide the world among themselves and create their own spheres of influence and do a kind of triumvirate to where they have their own little kingdoms where they will.
00:53I'm not sure if that's really a correct reading of what Donald Trump is doing and what he sees. He's not thinking in 20th century Yalta, Stalin, Churchill categories of dividing the world. He's thinking more about, well, I want to be on the same level as the most powerful people in the world, and I want to do business with them.
01:13So that's the very basic instinct where he is coming from. But since he is conflating trade and tariffs with security, that makes allies particularly nervous. With Japan, he's talking about trade and tariffs, but also about Japanese security.
01:31Europeans have a very important NATO summit coming up at the end of June in The Hague. A trade and tariff war with Trump will not be looked at separately from that.
01:40The administration is looking through all that for one lens. And for Europe, that lens is obviously a free wider lens you're not paying up.
01:47So this linkage between trade and tariffs, between security, between questions about US reliability as an ally are all coming together into one mix, which again makes it incredibly difficult to negotiate,
02:02especially for an entity like the European Union, which is only focused on negotiating trade and everything else in Europe, what security is done by NATO.
02:13That's really interesting. So just to emphasize what you just said, the conflation of trade and tariffs with security is an almost uniquely American perspective, or is that a uniquely Trumpian perspective?
02:24That's really unique.
02:25That's really unique. Others are doing that too. China, for example, has used a lot of economic pressure to pursue its security interests.
02:34It has pressured European countries to not support Taiwan and so on. So it's not entirely unique, but it is pretty new for the United States.
02:44So these things are put together in a coercive way and in a mixture of threats. In the past, usually trade and security have been seen separately from each other and have been dealt separately with each other.
02:55Thank you very much.