EU-US Relations: Isn't it time for a transatlantic divorce or at least a separation? - editorial

When the US President Trump went to Europe earlier in the summer his trip certainly did not score many positive points, but at least what it did was show the EU and its leaders that they had to start taking more responsibility for the direction in which the EU should be heading.

This hit home even harder when German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech back home declaring "the times in which we could rely fully on others" are "somewhat over" and suggesting Europe "really take our fate into our own hands."

Interviews with six top EU officials paint a picture of a US president who is regarded even by allies as erratic and limited, and whose shortcomings are compounded by the ongoing chaos beneath him in the White House.

The US President has also become something of a laughing stock among European politicians at international gatherings. One revealed that a small group of diplomats play a version of word bingo, whenever the president speaks because they consider his vocabulary to be so limited. “Everything is ‘great’, ‘very, very great’, ‘amazing’,” the diplomat said.

But behind the mocking, there is growing fear among international and EU governments that Trump is a serious threat to international peace and stability.

But unfortunately the negative perception is not just about President Trump, it is also, and probably more so about the overall state of the country's totally disfunctional gridlocked political system.

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co, who  is known for his frequently outspoken comments and who turned down an opportunity to become Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, noted at a conference he was attending:  “It’s almost an embarrassment being an American citizen traveling around the world ... listening to the stupid s*** we have to deal with in the US,” he said. “At one point we all have to get our act together, or we won’t do what we’re supposed to do for the average Americans.”

JPMorgan Chase & Co, which under Dimon's leadership reported a profit of $7.03bn for the second quarter, 13 per cent higher than last year, has also made $26.5bn over the past 12 months, a record profit for a US bank, according to the Associated Press.

Eric Zuess, writing in Counterpunch: noted , "American democracy is a sham, no matter how much it's pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control the nation's "news" media)," he wrote. "The US, in other words, is basically similar to Russia or most other dubious 'electoral' 'democratic' countries. We weren't formerly, but we clearly are now."

Like it or not, the US has become an oligarchy and is not a democracy anymore. The country is dominated by a rich and powerful elite. So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.

They come to this conclusion by multivariate analysis, which indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

In plain English: in the US the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.

This brings us back to the need for the EU to seriously review their Transatlantic relationship with the US. because what used to bind the two continents together in the past, has disappeared, mainly because of a series of developments (described above) on the opposite side of the Atlantic.

For the Europeans it might look as an impossible task at the moment, but in reality won't be too difficult to do.

Let us keep in mind that the EU as an independent economic entity has the power to do so, all it requires now is the unity and will-power to follow through.

The only major objective it will require is unity among EU States, in carving out an independent foreign policy for the EU, which is detached from that of the US, specifically when it concerns military operations, in addition to economic policies and trade agreements.

In the past, what has been good for America, has not, or hardly ever been beneficial to the EU.

Specially the EU involvement in US Middle East wars, which caused the worst immigrant crises ever faced by the EU. 

Also important to remember - The European Union is not a "tidly-bitly" disorganized group of nations. It  ranks as the world’s second-largest economy by gross domestic product, but few people globally see it as an economic leader ahead of China or the United States, according to a recent Pew Research Center report.

Even citizens of the EU don't seem to be aware of the power the EU has. Time maybe for the EU to start blowing their own horn - because when our own people are left in the dark, it's  no-one's fault except our own. 

Another important fact: At the latest census in 2015 the EU had 743.1 million inhabitants, more than double that of the US, which at the latest census there in 2016 had 323.1 million.

So EU Commission and EU Parliament, please wake-up, and smell the roses - the time is now to take serious and decisive action.

Where there is a will there is a way. The EU can't keep walking in "lock-step" with the US anymore 

EU-Digest

The Transatlantic Pact: Merkel's blunt speech sparks fears of rupture in transatlantic pact

The Transatlantic Alliance - two worlds apart

German Chancellor Angela Merkel hinted that a major geostrategic shift may be under way when she told a Munich rally on Sunday that Europe must fight “for our destiny” in the wake of Brexit and an apparent US withdrawal from the world stage.

Speaking to some 2,500 supporters at an election rally in Munich, Merkel said European Union nations must remain united as they navigate Britain’s departure from the bloc and as disparities with the United States – on both policy and priorities – come into sharp relief.

"The era in which we could fully count on others is somewhat over, as I have noted in the past few days," Merkel said, in an apparent reference to her interactions with US and British leaders at a two-day G7 summit in Sicily that ended on Saturday.

"And so all I can say is that we, Europeans, must take our destiny into our own hands," she said.

Merkel's blunt speech sparks fears of rupture in transatlantic pact

EU-Russia: Could a greater Europe including Russia be better off politically for EU than the present Transatlantic Alliance with US?

Global markets are still jumpy about the situation between Russia and Ukraine. But as one market analyst notes, there's a reason Europe has more to fear than the U.S.

Wells Fargo's Jay Bryson writes that while American trade ties with Russia are more extensive than with the Ukraine, the "overall numbers are still rather small when viewed in the context the overall U.S. economy."

"American exports to Russia total about $11 billion, which is less than 1 percent of overall American exports of goods," he noted. "A bit more than 1 percent of total U.S. imports come from Russia (about $30 billion)."

But in Europe, the trade exposure is much more extensive, Bryson writes. 

From the note:

EU exports to Russia total about $150 billion, which accounts for more than 7 percent of the total exports that the European Union sends outside of its borders. Conversely, the European Union receives nearly 12 percent (about $250 billion) of its imports from Russia. Notably, these imports are concentrated in energy products.

OECD Europe imports about 10 million barrels per day (mbd) of crude oil to satisfy its oil consumption that totals 13 mbd. Although OECD Europe imports oil from many different countries, Russia is the single most important source of petroleum products for Europe. Moreover, Russia produces about 11 mbd, which represent about one-eighth of total global production of crude oil. Thus, Russia can have potentially marked effects on global oil prices.

Read more: COTD Europe And US Ties With Russia - Business Insider

Falling out of love with America - by Simon Kuper FT

"When I went to study in the US in 1993, I did what we members of the “transatlantic generation” were supposed to do: I fell in love with America. I liked how you could talk to someone at a bus stop without their thinking you were a serial killer. I liked living in a rich, optimistic country. I liked brunch. Yet the US also seemed reassuringly familiar. I felt I’d known it for ever, and not just thanks to Archie comics. In politics, both candidates in the 1992 election, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, could have slotted seamlessly into the European political scene. Indeed, in Britain the right instinctively backed Bush and the left Clinton.

After I left the US, it took me a year to get over it. But now, viewing the elections from Europe, the US feels like an alien land. “The Atlantic seems to have got a bit wider,” says Daniel Keohane, head of strategic affairs at the European think-tank Fride. It’s become hard to say “our shared western values” without smirking.

Before about 2000, the US as a polity didn’t look very unlike a European country writ large. Of course, Americans and Europeans each had their own peculiarities. However, for decades we were both oases of democracy in a mostly unfree world. We shared formative memories of the second world war. We worried together about the Soviets. We largely traded with each other. Many European politicians talked about God at least as often as Americans did. Nor were Americans much more conservative than us. In the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship, and probably Major-Clinton, the Briton was on the right. Our alliance really was built on shared values. In 1990, 2001 and 2003 the US assembled western coalitions to fight big wars.

Beyond the minor Libyan exercise, it’s hard to imagine that happening again, says Keohane. Since just 2000, we’ve grown far apart. Several factors coincided. The Soviet threat collapsed. Shared memories of beating Hitler waned. Less visibly, students’ migratory patterns changed: ever more Europeans study in other European countries rather than the US. Germany and Britain now send fewer students to America than do Nepal or Vietnam.

In politics and economics, we diverged spectacularly. George W. Bush introduced a peculiarly non-European evangelical Christianity into presidential politics. He landed Europeans in two wars that we ended up regretting. He shattered the belief that western countries stood together for human rights. Our mutual trade waned: in the decade to 2007, even before the economic crisis, the share of the European Union’s imports coming from the US halved to just 12 per cent.

Meanwhile, as money flooded American politics like never before, US elections came to provide Europeans with an alien spectacle of plutocrats fighting aristocrats. Here’s a typical line from The Economist, about Pennsylvania’s senate race: “Though Mr Casey is the son of a popular former governor, Mr Smith has vowed to spend millions of dollars of his own fortune on the campaign, lashing Mr Casey …”About $5.8bn will be spent nationwide in these elections, says the Center for Responsive Politics. By contrast, as David Cameron noted recently on the Late Show with David Letterman, British political parties cannot even advertise on TV.

In France, where I live, the media have been cataloguing the American election with fascination, as if documenting the outlandish mating habits of some newly discovered Amazonian tribe. Even the welcome fact that it pits a Mormon against a black man – two products of a non-European US – only makes the spectacle more alien to Europeans.

At least we’re still interested in Americans. The reverse decreasingly applies. In 2003, the British historian Tony Judt told me that the prevailing American intellectual view of Europe was “a cemetery with great art”, but things have worsened since. In the presidential debate on foreign policy, Israel got almost seven times more mentions than all western European nations combined, calculates foreignpolicy.com. Provided our rotten currency doesn’t blow up and disturb serious countries, Europe can safely be forgotten.

The Atlantic will probably widen further if Mitt Romney wins. Since 2000, Europeans have become fervent Democrats. In 2008, Barack Obama would have been elected leader of any European country where he’d run. Even now, according to polling by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 75 per cent of Europeans back him. Just 8 per cent support Romney. Though Obama ignores us, Europeans still consider him one of us.
By contrast, at a recent Parisian dinner I heard a senior European politician describe Romney – inaccurately – as “a foolish guy, a stupid man”. “Romney: L’Extraterrestre”, screamed a magazine cover here, encapsulating the view of Republicans as aliens.

I’m not saying Europeans are right about Republicans. Perhaps the Tea Party is correct, and Europeans are crazed, bankrupt, jihad-supporting socialists. My point is that a Republican-led US would share few values with Europeans. Sure, Republicans believe in democracy, but so now do Indonesians and Ghanaians. “We are all Americans”, Le Monde famously headlined on September 13 2001. That’s over."

Read more: Falling out of love with America - FT.com

EU-US: Transatlantic trade deal on the horizon?

As pressure on the eurozone eases, Europe and the United States are becoming increasingly convinced that they need to strengthen their partnership in order to maintain a leading competitive edge in the global economy.

“The old boys need to say clearly that they are still in business,” said EU Ambassador to Washington João Vale de Almeida, speaking at an event organized by the American Chamber of Commerce to the EU (AmCham EU).

The state of the transatlantic economy has suffered the blow of the euro crisis but remains the largest and wealthiest in the world, with over 50% of world GDP in terms of value and 41% in terms of purchasing power, according to a report released yesterday (22 March).

 “No other commercial artery in the world is as integrated as the transatlantic economy,” said Joseph Quinlan, an author of the report published by the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University. “Its health is vital to the health of the entire global economy.”

For more: Transatlantic trade deal on the horizon? | EurActiv