If you’re looking at the early days, it started as the European coal and steel community and its primary

purpose was to facilitate the movement of goods and services within the core of six regional countries
and this was done with the explicit blessing of the United States, of the Truman and Eisenhower
administrations, back in the early 1950s. Now if you’re looking at the establishment of the European
Union as it exists in its present form, specifically since the Lisbon agreement was signed, when the
current institutional framework was created, then there may be some truth to it. Because in reality it
has behaved over the past two decades like a trading block ready and willing to take advantage of the
very open US market while inciting all sorts of subtle or not so subtle protectionist clauses into its own
trading group. Also, we need to bear in mind that very often European products have an built-in subsidy
which is not directly visible, it is not like a subsidy that goes straight to the manufacturer or to the
farmer but it goes via circuitous routes so that very often it’s hard to tell what is the percentage of built-
in subsidies from Brussels which have found a way, for instance, through the French Ministry
of Agriculture, coming from European funds and making French cheese, for instance, more competitive
than it otherwise would have been.

Trump has always had a certain Eurosceptic view and I think it is well in line with his sovereignist
principles. During the election campaign, he did make skeptical statements and he even received Nigel
Farage of UKIP in Washington and so on, because he believes that the European Union is effectively a
globalist cabal in which deracinated elites, alienated from their own nations, are finding much more
in common with each other then with their own people. To some extent I think this is a perfectly
justified assessment, because if you look at the way Brussels is trying to treat, say, Hungry, Poland,
Slovakia and the Czech Republic on the issue of migrant quotas, which of course those countries are
rejecting, we see that the attempts by the European Union to play the arbiter of social and cultural
norms has gotten out of hand, and in that sense I think that Trump wouldn’t be able to articulate the
issue in quite the same terms, but this is nevertheless his instinct. Trump went in the right direction
when we remember his statements from 2016 and when we bear in mind that, of course, for most
leaders of the European Union was the election was the equivalent of a global catastrophe, for instance,
the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, could barely conceal her disdain and her shock. So no doubt that
Jean-Claude Junker and the rest of the Brussels nomenclatura would’ve been infinitely more
comfortable with Hillary Clinton in the White House, but at the same time, I think when push comes
to shove, there will be some give-and-take because at least with the European Union we’re not looking
at a potential existential geopolitical foe of the United States as we are in the case of China, where
escalation of the trade war is accompanied by an escalation of geopolitical rivalry in the South China Sea
and elsewhere.

Viewed in historical perspective, America’s backing for European integration—or a “United States of
Europe,” as U.S. officials and politicians called it—was extraordinary. It was arguably the first time that a
preponderant power had pursued unity rather than division in an area under its influence. But U.S.
reasoning was sound. What the United States sought was the emergence of Europe as a vigorous, free-
standing pillar of an open world. And that is what it got

The European Payments Union, which was launched a few years later, again at U.S. insistence,
multilateralized European economic policy by establishing a debt and credit clearing house and thereby
limiting the possibility that European countries could restrict imports from each other. These American
initiatives set the stage for the Schuman Plan and the first institutions of supranational European
governance, the founding of which was again strongly supported by the United States.