“It is a dark day that when an alliance of free peoples, gathered to assert their values and defend their interests, resolves to submission. »»
No, it was not the Prime Minister of a Canadian province that made these remarks after the new increase in customs duties decreed by Donald Trump on Canadian products.
Rather, it was the French Prime Minister, François Bayrou, who spoke at the start of the week, following the trade agreement concluded by the European Union (EU) with the United States.
Photo Thibaud Moritz, agency France-Presse
French Prime Minister François Bayrou strongly condemned the new trade agreement concluded between the European Union and the United States.
Because Europe, unlike Canada, has managed to agree with the Trump administration. But at what price? wonder, on the old continent, several criticisms of this agreement.
“This agreement is very similar to an act of total submission to a brute. This is undeniably a demonstration of weakness, ”confirms Sébastien Plato, professor of public law and director of the master of European law at the University of Bordeaux.
However, the EU had many means of pressure to stand up to Donald Trump!
“Customs rights, of course, but also the anti-coercion instrument, a legal text allowing the European Union to take measures in response to a situation in which a third country seeks to put pressure on the European Union or a Member State to make a particular choice by applying or threatening to apply measures affecting trade or investments,” explains the professor, who answered my questions by email.
Rather, the European Union has offered the American president a long list of concessions.
For example, she accepted customs duties of 15 % on most of the products it exports to the United States. She also promised to buy 750 billion US energy in the United States as well as more military equipment, in addition to investing US 600 billion by 20281.
PHOTO JACQUELYN MARTIN, ASSOCIATED PRESS
President Donald Trump hands the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen on Sunday in Turnberry, Scotland.
Well, at the discharge of EU negotiators, others, like Japan, had already bent in the American president.
No doubt, Donald Trump’s extortion attempts are multiplying … and often work!
The word that is best suited to these agreements was pronounced, in France, by the president of the right republican group in the National Assembly, Laurent Wauquiez. He described the agreement between the United States and the European Union as “racketeering”.
Difficult to contradict him.
Since the start of Donald Trump’s second term, it appears clearly that what the president masters is not “the art of deal “, As he has often dared to claim it.
No, it is the art of taxing that he practices. With brutality. Unscrupulous.
Like: proud-in-law in the school courtyard which, simply because it is the strongest, claims (and obtains) the new shoes of another student.
I asked Geneviève Dufour, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, specializing in international trade issues, if she were of this opinion.
“That’s it! It’s like Shylock, “she replied, referring to the lender on wages of Merchantfrom Shakespeare, famous for its greed.
“And it is as if we had to go and meet the godfather and present our tributes to him,” she adds.
Godfather…
This is one of the words that Donald Trump, the former FBI director James Comey had used, described, to describe Donald Trump. He considered the former businessman “morally unfit” to lead the United States.
Besides, Racket Man is not only raging on the international trade level.
He also practices extortion inside his borders, with a mixture of enthusiasm and ferocity.
The leaders of Columbia University have also broken the recently spine (like renowned law firms and large TV networks).
They agreed to pay US 200 million to the federal state over three years to recover “the majority” of federal subsidies which had been blocked last March, under the pretext of the fight against anti -Semitism.
The Harvard University, which has been the subject of similar accusations, would also be about to fold. And “President Trump demanded in private that Harvard pays much more than Columbia,” said the New York Times.
Because Racket Man erected arbitrariness in system.
He sets his requirements at the head of the customer. And it may also depend on his mood the day you negotiate with him.
How to explain that so many countries capitulate before the President of the United States?
“Because the United States is the largest world power on several levels. Not fair on the commercial level, but also on the safe level. Because it is a very large exporter who is part of integrated supply chains, ”explains Geneviève Dufour.
And, above all, because Donald Trump puts into practice the theory of the madman, she thinks.
The expression was used several decades ago in the United States, when another Republican, Richard Nixon, was in the White House. As part of the Vietnam War, he wanted to give the impression that he was crazy, that is to say that he was unpredictable and ready for anything.
PHOTO ARCHIVES ASSOCIATED PRESS
Former United States President Richard Nixon in 1973
“Mr. Trump floods us with so many threats that we say that he is going to put an execution at some point. And we would not want to be the country that has not done things well, “says the expert, who considers that the countries capitulate because they” want to avoid the worst “.
But perhaps also that some are cunning.
Sébastien Plato recalls that the agreement between the United States and the European Union, like most other agreements concluded under Donald Trump, has no legal value.
Of course, customs duties will apply. And it’s dismay. But the European Commission has also made several promises that it cannot fulfill alone.
“It is the Member States and the companies that decide their energy purchases. It is the Member States that decide where they buy their military equipment. It is the investors who decide where they invest. In reality, some recent developments suggest that these commitments are more estimates than promises, “he explains.
Sébastien Plato therefore thinks that Europeans may have decided to give Donald Trump “an apparent victory” and then be able to “adjust the details, from which he laughs, to their advantage”.
So much the better if the Europeans have found a parade to resist, as much as possible, to the assaults of racketeering man.
The Canadian government has obviously preferred to pass its turn. At least for the moment. Probably to avoid making unreasonable extortion measures. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had repeated that he would only sign a “good for Canada” agreement.
Thank God, the Canada-Unannis-Mexico agreement, thanks to which the majority of products exported by Canada will continue to enter the United States without customs rights, allows us to save furniture.
Because when the balance of power come to determine the terms of international trade, Canada, it must be said, does not make the weight.
1. Read “the United States concludes a preliminary commercial agreement with the EU”
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