Europe develops alternative economic strategies to the USA

Against the intrusion of the President of the United States, Europe is currently opposing a strategy of trade agreements: a response that is only partly political, which is part of the greater room for maneuver, the economic one, available to Brussels. Certainly agreeing with China, the main economic adversary, of the US, is also a political act, which has a signified of an aversion to Washington's politics. However, the new trade agreements with China appear to be an obligatory choice to preserve the economic benefits that Trump's trade war risks to reduce. Of course, the agreement with Beijing is in the name of free trade and globalization and takes place on the basis of the philosophy of multilateral relations, in a clear antithesis to the protectionist measures of the North American country; but the nature of the agreement is also doubtful because it is stipulated between two subjects with visions that are profoundly different on the rights and also unbalanced in terms of costs and guarantees of the respective workers. The most important factor remains the market, which with its volume of trade between Europe and China ensures the value of a billion and a half of goods exchanged between the two parties. This figure is the most eloquent to find a sort of justification for the relationship with China: to continue to ensure a level of production that could be reduced by the duties that Trump wants to apply on European products. If, on the one hand, we can understand the desire to provide European companies with an outlet for their productions, we must also consider whether China can only be an economic partner or, through this relationship, does not want to be ever more influential in Europe. This danger is such because the European political relevance is still too limited by the room for maneuver that its members are unable to grant; it must be very clear that greater political integration, with a specific central institutional weight supported by the member states, guarantees to the central institutions a greater capacity for bargaining and for responding to external political demands. On the other hand, it is also necessary to safeguard the Union from the external attacks of characters like Trump, but also as Putin, who aim at a division of Europe to take greater advantage in economic and political negotiations, as well as having smaller and fragmented opponents compared to a unitary subject. The threat also comes from a front that can be defined as internal with the parties in favor of national sovereignty, closer to Trump and, therefore, hostile to agreements with China. The real danger is that the approach to China will become a further topic of division within the Union, a further factor of destabilization capable of compromising the current fragile balance. However, the need to maintain the current economic level can mitigate, at least in the short term, all doubts of the approach to China. One solution may be to take advantage of this period to open negotiations with Beijing on the subject of human rights, including them in trade agreements. Brussels, however, can start from the common vision with China on the theme of global warming and the fight against pollution, about which the European positions are close to those in China and more and more distant from those of the United States of Trump. Meanwhile, on the commercial front, Europe always looks to the east but with a subject, such as Japan, with which it has more similarities. After four years of negotiations, the agreement between Europe and Japan has been unblocked by US isolationist tendencies; the two parties have signed an agreement that has been defined as the largest ever stipulated between the two areas and which provides for free trade, eliminating tariff barriers in the automobile sectors, and in agricultural and food sectors, beyond the signing of several common policies regarding both regional and multilateral issues. These are unequivocal signs that the US allies are developing and developing alternative strategies that predict the absence of Washington from their negotiating tables and which mark a radical change in international politics regarding Western countries.