The publication of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy has forced Europe to confront its potential geopolitical isolation. That effort came to a crossroad this week. The European Union had to decide how to keep Ukraine financially afloat for the next two years. It also needed to decide whether to commit to a new free trade agreement with South America.
Does supporting Europe’s far right advance U.S. interests? What’s at stake in Europe’s free trade agreement with South America? Should Europe accept its geopolitical decline?
The publication of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy has forced Europe to confront its potential geopolitical isolation. That effort came to a crossroad this week. The European Union had to decide how to keep Ukraine financially afloat for the next two years. It also needed to decide whether to commit to a new free trade agreement with South America.
Does supporting Europe’s far right advance U.S. interests? What’s at stake in Europe’s free trade agreement with South America? Should Europe accept its geopolitical decline?
Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: The U.S. National Security Strategy suggests that Washington, in the future, will support Europe’s nationalist far right rather than the traditional parties it has supported in the post-World War II period. In realpolitik terms, how does this advance U.S. interests?
Adam Tooze: This is always one of the paradoxes in right-wing internationalism, that it’s a sort of contradictory formation. The more nationalist they are, the harder you find it to collaborate with other people. The administration may be losing the bedrock pro-Americanism that has traditionally shored up support for Washington. The real question one must ask about the Trump administration is whether they’re pro-American. Not in the naive sense that they’re tools of Russian President Vladimir Putin. That’s not my point. The way I read the National Security Strategy is that they understand the world is divided into different spheres. America simply claims the Western Hemisphere as part of the Monroe Doctrine. Relations with Russia and China are great-power relations.
But the trans-Atlantic relationship basically is one big political field in which you wage culture war at home and in Europe. And in Europe, you can, in fact, be somewhat more outspoken than you can at home. You can be more racist toward Europe than you can at home. You could be more overtly Islamophobic than you can at home, though they are pushing the boundaries all the time. And so, to that extent, the question isn’t really whether by pushing a strategy like this, you make Europe more or less pro-American. The aim of the game is to redefine what America stands for by way of a proxy war in Europe. And that obviously also entails redefining what Europe is. I mean, Vice President J.D. Vance I think quite openly regards Republicans like John McCain or centrist Democrats like Joe Biden as not the kind of America he’s pro.
And they go to Europe not to defend America but to defend their particular interpretation of what America is. And so that’s the stark reality that we have to get used to. And that’s what’s profoundly destabilizing for Europe because it’s literally saying that international relations are not distinct from domestic politics. Everything is partisan, to put it in rather old-fashioned terms; the whole field is ideological, and we’re just playing for keeps across the entire zone. Then, at a secondary level, can you come to terms with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban? Or could you come to terms with a nationalist Germany over trade policy? That’s a downstream kind of issue. The first instance is you’re just waging a unified trans-Atlantic culture war in which Vance fired the first shot at the Munich Security Conference earlier in the year.
CA: Europe is still considering whether to finalize a free trade agreement with [Mercosur countries in] South America. What exactly is at stake here? Is it the pursuit of a universalist liberalizing agenda—or is it a more defensive agreement at this point, an expression of Europe looking for new alliances? Or is it both?
AT: Why does Mercosur matter so much? Because it’s been around forever. This question has been around for at least 25 years. They’ve actually had the text ready since 2019. And the stakes are huge. Because if you look around the world to places where there’s still big wins to be had in global trade liberalization, the biggest are in Latin America, and the others are in Africa. Because those are the two big regions of the world economy where intraregional integration is really low. Mercosur is one of the vehicles through which the more forward-looking policymakers in Latin America want to engage integration within their continent but then also to use that as a vehicle for expansive trade integration. And who are the partners here? The key partner is Brazil. And if you look in the G-20 or any other global grouping at democracies with functioning rule of law, you would think an EU-Brazil hookup at virtually any price would be something you would be pushing for.
Because otherwise Latin America is heavily connected to China at this point, which is Brazil’s main trading partner. And there is really a strategic stake here. What are the downsides? Well, there are issues around environmental protection and so on, but Brazil is a serious player in that game. If you’re worried about the Amazon, you deal with progressive Brazilian governments to actually make improvements there. It’s not as if the Europeans have to bring that to Brazil. That’s ridiculously condescending and outdated. Fundamentally, this comes down to the most classic, yawningly familiar, and really astonishing fact that in France and Italy, farm interests still have a massively outsized whip hand over economic policy. It’s really staggering. You look at the numbers—less than 2 percent of the population in France works in agriculture, yet President Emmanuel Macron is running scared of the farm lobby and farm protests. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is likewise making concessions. And the Brazilians aren’t willing to wait anymore.
And you can hardly blame them. This is undignified. It’s absurd. This negotiation has been going on forever. And at some point, suddenly, Paris and Rome have decided, whoops, we don’t like the terms. It’s truly staggering that this should even really be any longer a matter of discussion. And again, the signs are not looking good at this particular point. And Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has basically said, unless this is done by the end of the year, forget it, we’re done. So it’s quite dramatic. Again, it’s a test of Germany because Germany is quite committed to the agreement with Mercosur, and it’ll be interesting to see whether German Chancellor Friedrich Merz can really exercise enough leverage over Macron and Meloni to get this done. I’m speaking as a trade liberal. There are folks on the left who will say this is subverting European standards. Built into that is also a condescension toward Brazil, which at this point has to be treated absolutely as a peer player in all of the domains of regulation that Europeans are interested in.
CA: What should Europe’s strategy be going forward in this new world where it may no longer have an alliance with a superpower in the form of the United States? Should it be pursuing geopolitical ambitions of its own as an expression of sovereignty? Or in contrast, to take up a suggestion in a recent New York Times article by Anton Jäger, should Europe be looking to find ways of gracefully declining? What do you think pursuing decline would mean in practice?
AT: Yeah, it’s a fascinating piece. I’m really sympathetic to the basic position that says there are certain aspirations that it will be foolish and anachronistic for Europe to be chasing. But I’m really not comfortable with the framing in terms of decline. I just don’t understand why anyone should accept that framing. And this in part biographical—I grew up in and out of the U.K. in the ’70s and ’80s, which was obsessed with decline as a kind of morbid phenomenon. And it was always just a really bad framing of a situation, which at times was that of crisis and generally wasn’t.
And in the current moment, surely the real challenge is not so much whether Europe should accept decline but whether Europe has the political capacity to define its own vision of future. I mean, it’s not as though the American paradigm of progress is one that anyone would want to uninhibitedly sign up for at the current moment. And if you know anything about the tensions within China, that’s also not a model. I mean, it’s totally not available because you have to have the highly idiosyncratic history of China. And on the other hand, it is very ambiguous as an experience of modernity and growth, right? It’s made them into a superpower, and America is a superpower. But if the question is, you know, what is it you would want for the future, I think there’s a wide open space in which negotiations between countries like Brazil and Europe could actually be quite important in shaping what a future could be.