Europe Is at Donald Trump’s Mercy. It Has Itself to Blame. Story by

Harrison Stetler

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How much more can Europe give to appease Trump? Despite months of concessions on everything from trade, defense and tech regulations, ties between the United States and its traditional allies remain as unstable as ever.

In mid-October, they appeared to be taking another turn for the worse when the White House announced that the U.S. president would hold a new round of in-person talks with Vladimir Putin, this time under the auspices of Hungarian strong man Victor Orbán. The Budapest summit was quickly cancelled, and Washington moved to impose sanctions on major Russian energy companies. Yet once again, Brussel’s charm diplomatic offensive was revealed for what is: a teetering house of cards that could come crashing down.

In late July, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen acceded to a deeply unbalanced trade deal with Washington designed to avert an open US-EU trade war. Signed at a Trump-owned golf course in Scotland, many hoped that the agreement, which fixed a 15-percent surcharge on exports to the United States without EU retaliation, would mark the beginning of a durable thaw in transatlantic relations.

Even that didn’t satisfy US President’s insatiable desire to keep Europe under his heel. In another recent ask, the White House has demanded that Brussels exempt American corporations from the bloc’s environmental rules and due diligence standards, which it deemed “serious and unwarranted regulatory overreach” in a position paper recently submitted to EU officials. “We are not rolling back on any of our laws,” a commission spokesperson said on October 9. In another sign of retreat, EU executives are reportedly preparing a “checklist” to underline how the bloc’s ongoing de-regulatory push can satisfy Trump’s demands.

Then there’s the ever-thorny question of Europe’s modest tech regulations. Trump blasted the early September decision by the European Commission—the EU’s executive arm—to impose a nearly 3 billion euros fine on Google for anti-competitive practices in the web advertising market. “My Administration will NOT allow these discriminatory actions to stand,” the US president wrote on Truth Social, aligning himself with a US tech sector up in arms at Brussels’ modest attempts to regulate Silicon Valley.