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On Sunday (May 25), President Donald Trump granted the European Union a brief lifeline in his quest for reciprocity on tariffs, extending the proposed 50% burden imposition to early July. “Europe is ready to advance talks swiftly and decisively,” declared EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen shortly after the hiatus was announced. However, her situation, and that of the 27 participating member states, is far more precarious than one might initially assume.

Without doubt, the EU bloc is a big and valuable trading partner to the United States. Indeed, America purchased more than $600 billion worth of goods and services from the Union in 2024, with members, in return, buying around $370 million. Princely sums, but uneven – especially considering that there are more potential consumers in the EU market than the US one (450 million souls compared with 347 million).

In fact, currently, the European Union is considering stripping Hungary of its voting rights within the EU parliament for attempting to implement a law on transparency in its own parliament. This supranational behemoth has gone well beyond scripting rules on single-market access. But therein lies the issue with negotiating a tariff deal with the Trump administration: If the EU is not a protectionist market for its members, it serves no real purpose.

The EU describes its “single market” like this:

“The EU aims to enable EU citizens to study, live, shop, work and retire in any EU country and enjoy products from all over Europe. To do this, it ensures free movement of goods, services, capital and persons in a single EU internal market. By removing technical, legal and bureaucratic barriers, the EU also allows citizens to trade and do business freely.”

Sounds fine, but such boilerplate is strictly for the tourists. In reality, the EU commission enacts rules and regulations in a highly partisan manner for each country in order to support and protect certain industries.

For example, the champagne industry – comprising some 16,000 producers in the region – gets subsidies from the EU courtesy of taxpayers in all 27 countries in the bloc. Or how about the German car industry? As a special carve-out, manufacturers no longer have to hit their global emissions deadlines by this year and can instead average emissions over a number of years, putting other carmakers at a serious disadvantage. Such climate-forgiving largesse will not be extended to foreign producers, naturally.

But if the European Union wants to avoid the fast-approaching 50% tariffs, it may have to do the unthinkable.

In the run-up to the 2016 Brexit vote that saw Britain leave the EU, doom-mongers predicted economic turmoil for the tiny UK as it would not have specialized access to the single market that comes only with membership in the bloc. Almost a decade later,  Trump is trying to do just that.

If the EU cannot offer intimate protections for specialized markets that tip the scales in favor of bloc members, why should such industries support the Union at all? After all, its sole purpose is trade protectionism within member states to the exclusion (and cost) of those outside its hallowed markets. The days of European Union exclusivity are surely coming to an end and, with it, the false sense of Pax Romana that globalists worldwide have long sought to emulate.