The fundamental solution for Europe to address the United States' unilateral policies is to fully break away from its economic, political, and diplomatic reliance on the country, said British scholar Martin Jacques on Friday.
Earlier this month, Trump threatened to impose 30 percent tariffs on European Union (EU) goods starting Aug. 1, prompting EU to accelerate trade talks. EU member states voted on Thursday to back a retaliatory tariff package on around 93 billion euros (109 billion U.S. dollars) worth of U.S. imports, due to kick in on Aug. 7 in case the talks fail.
"Europe needs to find a more independent path for its future, economically as well as politically and diplomatically, from the United States. The difficulty that Europe's got is that it has been the junior partner of the relationship with the United States for a very long time. And it was not Europe that wanted to change the relationship of the United States, it was America, it was Trump. That's how we reached this stage. Now the Europeans' reaction was one of distress, to be frank, about Trump shift, because basically the Europeans, it was not their decision and they could not imagine a future without a very close relationship with the United States, following the lead of the United States," said Jacques, former senior fellow at at Cambridge University's Department of Politics and International Studies.
Jacques emphasized that Europe's historical reliance on the U.S. has left it unprepared for the U.S. government's abrupt policy shifts, particularly under the Trump administration.
"And now they've been cast into a sort of uncertain world where they don't know what Trump's going to do and so on. Now, what Europe needs to do is to find a direction for itself. It needs to have to develop a stronger sense of what the future of Europe should be, what Europe's place in the world should be," said Jacques.
"Europe has been weak in response to the tariff. instead of working out what it thinks its future should be and what its economic relationship with Trump should be over tariff and so forth, it's sort of being dragged into a new situation without really having a strategic view as opposed to a sort of short term view of where it should go," he added.
He also noted that Europe's reactive approach stands in stark contrast to China's resolute stance against U.S. trade pressures.
"My view is that the Europeans should have worked out what their position was in relationship to the tariffs and made it clear as a bargaining petition to Trump. In this context, they should have learned from China. China stood up to Trump, and of course, Trump backed down in relationship to the tariffs. The European union has been very weak in comparison," said Jacques.
Europe must end dependency on US: British Scholar
