The EU Trade Deal: Are You Tired of Winning Yet?
Trump scores the biggest trade deal of them all, fresh off huge wins with China and Japan, plus NATO's commitment to a 250% defense spending increase.
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by Rod D. Martin
July 28, 2025
Are you tired of winning yet? Clearly President Trump isn’t.
Yesterday, the President clinched a supposedly impossible trade deal with the European Union. And the terms are pretty extraordinary.
Previously, Europe has charged America four times the tariff on autos that we charged them. They have long blocked most sales of farm goods. And since the start of the war, they have sent twice as much money to Moscow for energy as to Kiev for military aid, effectively subsidizing the Russian war machine while failing to purchase that energy from Texas and Louisiana, an obviously more secure and more mutually supportive option.
These are allies?
Trump just changed all of that. There will now be a flat 15% tariff in both directions on most goods. Europe’s markets will now be almost as open to the U.S. as ours are to theirs. And since I said “almost”, Europe will also “buy down” its gargantuan trade surplus with the U.S., in two ways:
$600 billion in new direct investment in U.S. manufacturing, and
$750 billion in energy purchases from the U.S. over the next three years alone.
In Dallas, there was much rejoicing.
Now you have to understand, this is all on top of NATO’s vastly increased commitments last month. For decades, the 31 non-U.S. “allies” paid just 29.5% of the cost of defending the alliance; the United States picked up 70.5% of the bill.
This might make sense if our European “partners” weren’t on the front line of any likely conflict. But they are. It also might be more reasonable if they weren’t all wealthy countries in their own right, or had recently been flattened as they were in the immediate aftermath of World War II when the U.S. agreed to such things.
Today, especially given Europe’s massive subsidy to Russia and equally annoying moralizing toward a U.S. that’s sent three times as much aid to Ukraine as all of them combined, none of this is in the same realm as “reasonable”. And Trump said so. Loudly. In his first term, he pushed them to spend 2% of GDP on defense, still a paltry sum compared to the U.S. but vastly more than they had been spending. Last month, with the Russia war in its third year, he got them to agree to 5%, which is in effect a 250% increase in NATO defense spending, not to mention battlefield effectiveness.
Were our “allies” effective before? Well let’s put it this way. The United Kingdom has twice as many admirals as warships. And until recently, Germany was training infantrymen with broomsticks because they didn’t have enough rifles.
Trump forced the issue. He made NATO into partners, not dependents. And now he’s done the same thing with trade.
The Disgraced Opposition
In both cases, Democrats, RINOs, and NeverTrumpers (but I repeat myself) told us — in the most hysterical possible terms — that not only was all this impossible, but that the exactly opposite would happen:
Trump was unalterably opposed to NATO
His purpose in pushing our “partners” to spend more on the collective defense was to shatter the alliance
His trade policy would bring recession, if not outright depression, to the U.S.
His tariffs would provoke the whole world to unite in a trade bloc against us
We would be isolated militarily and economically
And all of this (at least some thought) was because Trump was “Putin’s puppet”
Oddly, none of these people seemed that worked up over Joe Biden actually being Xi Jinping’s puppet. But that’s a different essay.
The real problem with all these people — the many who actually meant it, not the lying liars like Obama, Brennan, and Comey who knew at least the last bit was false — is that they, the Beltway Establishment, the Uniparty as it were, are the cowards on the playground. If there’s a weaker kid, yeah, they’ll rough him up and impose their will. But if there’s a bigger bully, or anyone who looks threatening for whatever improbable reason, they cower before that kid and give him their lunch money. “The fear of the thing is often worse than the thing itself.”
Naturally, people like that loathe the guy who stands up to the bully: they fear the consequences of resistance, yes, but they also fear the humiliation of being shown to be the cowards they are.
In Washington, add two additional elements: groupthink and inertia. You don’t get invited to many nice parties if you disagree with the monoculture. And you don’t like being questioned when you’ve spent your entire career writing papers no one read on the same tired thesis, especially if it becomes obsolete. Or worse, if it was always wrong.
So of course they hated Donald Trump, who openly said they were all idiots, who they all promised was a joke who could never get elected, and then started proving them wrong. He disagreed with the consensus, so he was not only a moron and a fool, he was a threat, to everything they believed in and to their own self-worth.
And now that’s all undone. The unmasking, as it were, is complete.
Trump was not, in fact, unalterably opposed to NATO: quite the opposite, he demanded it go to the gym and bulk up so it could fight alongside us as true partners, a capability highly likely to deter whatever war might come.
This should have been obvious, just as it should have been obvious that anyone who cared about NATO should desire this course and this outcome. But groupthink and inertia are powerful indeed.
Trump’s trade policy has not, in fact, brought recession, much less depression, and not even Jay Powell’s grossly politicized Fed can change that. Instead, it has opened countries across the world to U.S. products, countries that had hindered or outright banned our goods, well, always (and make no mistake: a 280% tariff on U.S. dairy doesn’t mean Ottawa collects more tax revenue, but rather that American dairy farmers can’t sell in Canada).
Why should countries have access to the biggest consumer market on Earth if they won’t give us that same access? I’m a free trader, but how is that not obvious?
No, Trump’s tough stance did not unite the world against us, on either front. Japan and China were never going to form a military alliance. Europe was never going to “go it alone”, no matter what they said. And likewise, Europe could never absorb all the Chinese goods shut out of the U.S. market if Trump’s 145% tariff effectively embargoed China, and neither could anyone else, nor any collection of anyone else.
One wonders if denizens of the Beltway ever took math.
And since this was always obvious, all of them needed a “reason” for their absurdities — which really came down to needing a justification for not resetting both trade and defense for the 35 years, their entire careers, since the end of the Cold War. Obama’s Russiagate fabrication served quite well: “Trump is destroying America because Putin has something on him!” Once that bit of hyperventilation took hold, no policy debate was required.
The Most Dramatic Six Months Since the End of World War II
If I were to attempt to address all of the incredible events of the last six months, I would end up writing a book. I’ve already done that: it’s called Essays on the Counterrevolution. You can get that here:
Nevertheless, a quick look at the world remade is in order.
Trump’s EU deal is the biggest trade deal in world history.
Trump played chicken with China…and won: China agreed not only to open its markets to U.S. goods, but also to a total 55% tariff on Chinese imports while charging the U.S. just 10% (it can bring those down if it enforces U.S. intellectual property rights and stops the flow of fentanyl). That’s called a “surrender”.
Far from isolating America, Trump made deals with China’s neighbors isolating it, by placing enormous tariffs on goods transshipped through them from China, and by making it far more desirable to trade with the U.S.
Trump negotiated an enormous, nearly-free trade deal with the UK that gives the U.S. veto power over Chinese investment in Britain.
Trump renewed Middle Eastern alliances and came home with trillions in new investment.
Trump (with Netanyahu) wiped out Iran’s nuclear program, thus securing the entire region and showing who’s boss, all without deploying a single soldier.
Oh, and in his spare time, he negotiated a ceasefire between nuclear powers India and Pakistan, brought peace to a 30-year conflict between Rwanda and the Congo (and got an enormous rare earths deal in the process), and put ever-escalating pressure on Russia to resolve its conflict with Ukraine.
As Rush Limbaugh would have said, see I told you so.
We are on the brink of a world in which American manufacturing and energy exports are dominant, NATO and its Asian allies (including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, and even India) are two-to-three times stronger than ever before, Iran is no longer a threat (and might be a friendly constitutional monarchy under Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi), Israel is secure in its borders and allied with half the Middle East (including Saudi Arabia and even Syria), and China is sufficiently contained that we avoid any meaningful likelihood of war.
It’s happening, right before our eyes. Turns out, defanging the Deep State mattered to more than just America. A lot more.
And that’s just the foreign policy landscape.
Donald Trump isn’t just courageous, and unflappable, and insightful. He’s a force of nature. No one except Elon Musk gets half as much done.
And this is just the end of the first six months.
