"A deal is a deal"
The fuck it is. There are no deals possible with the US. Bad faith actors with no court, congress or rule of law.
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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Indeed, I'm all 🍿
Unfortunately the EU has no say in the tariffs that the US charges its own citizens. US customs can just ignore the Supreme Court ruling and keep charging people to get their stuff out of lockdown and there's not a whole lot anyone can do. In theory the Supreme Court could maybe charge Trump with contempt of court but that's about as likely as Trump suddenly becoming a decent human being instead of an ambulatory bag of excrement.
Unfortunately the EU has no say
Actually we do, when Trump last time threatened EU, EU suspended the ratification process of the trade deal, and Trump IMMEDIATELY pulled back.
EU has lots of options to retaliate against USA, for instance tax on American IT services is a very high ranking one.
Just Denmark alone supply 70% of insulin to USA. And handles 30% of container cargo to USA. This was revealed recently because of Trump threats against Greenland, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark.
USA is far from as independent as they like to pretend, they have dependencies even on a tiny country like Denmark of only 6 million citizens.
EU has given many admissions to USA under Trump, but patience is running out.
I like the option of not acknowledging US copyrights, patents, or trademarks for a minimum of one year
Let's see how quickly the oligarchs attack Trump
EU has lots of options to retaliate against USA
They do indeed. Aren't they like the third largest economic market in the world? They can make it really sting if they're motivated.
I think patience has already run out. It is rather a calculated approach of identifying what does and what doesn't depend on the USA, and setting up alternatives for those things that do depend on the USA for example through trade deals (Mercosur, India) and investing in independent tech (funding open source projects, governments moving to native tech alternatives).
In the past year the EU has found out that it depends scarily much on the USA, but also that it can be more independent than expected while also having serious economic leverage.
I agree, it's a game of minimizing the damage. But at some point, there may be a desire to teach Trump a lesson.
According to game theory, you definitely need to shut the bully down thoroughly at some point. We have not done that yet. Even if we are the weaker party, we need to do this:
https://phys.org/news/2023-06-game-theory-bullies.html
Losing patience IMO is the point where we take the lesson from game theory, and do something to retaliate that harm USA and Trump.
In this case, what game theory dictates is also occurring as a natural human trait. But it takes courage.
Unfortunately the EU has no say in the tariffs that the US charges its own citizens
They can say:
"Since US Consumers can pay 15% more, we've decided to implement a 15% export fee to any product to the US."
That takes the "power" away from trump, he can raise the price as much as he wants but he becomes powerless to lower it.
Almost every "American" product is at best assembled components, and each one of those components can be hit by export fees by the country that makes them.
It's a very easy movie, almost guaranteed to work, and makes them money. I don't know why they're not doing it.
It's a very easy movie, almost guaranteed to work, and makes them money. I don't know why they're not doing it.
Probably because export tariffs make your product less appealing to import compared to other potential competing exporters who don't collude on an export tax, or the target country who might be incentives to produce domestically instead of importing. Obviously, some industries are more geographically locked than others, but these deals still have knock on effects.
Well, yeah, but the EU could go for retaliatory tariffs again, which could put huge economic pressure on the US, hopefully forcing Trump's hand into honouring the deal.
I wonder if EU will have enough spine this time. We can tariff the digital services...
That's the one that will really hurt (the right people) - Canada and EU dropping US copyright would hurt too, and if all else fails, just dump Treasuries
AFAIK it has actually been suggested that EU could drop American patents, to create a competitive IT infrastructure without USA.
I suppose copyright could be a logical follow up.
As a US citizen... Dropping us copyright would be a critical blow. Don't enforce rights on tv/novies/games/music would crumble the economy. I'm not against it but yeah, that's a nuke to the economy.
Trump is so weak, they should capitalize on this moment.