I'm the “European elite” you're thinking of. Well, not “elite” in the sense of being rich, I'm not rich, but I'm also not stupid.
It's simple: global trade is good, isolationism is bad. It's as simple as that.
The “EU common classes” don't want higher prices or poorer services. This is a fact that the US's elites in power will soon discover. And it's easy to see why this trend is a train wreck in progress: unemployment, in both the US and EU, is at an all-time low, and if you significantly lower imports via tariffs and economic wars, who do you think will work on those local products and services? Never mind that US's investments and exports are also crashing as a direct result of this administration's policies, so I'm guessing they rely on future software developers that end up unemployed to become lumberjacks.
But yes, now that the US is no longer a trustworthy ally, I want the EU to cut its tech dependencies from it for as much as possible, while strengthening ties with all of our other allies, such as Canada, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, India. There's no conflict in this reasoning.
Employment stats in the EU are a complete joke and don't reflect at all real work/value creation. It's all about moving numbers from one box to another.
Just because you made one more bureaucrat bullshit job does not mean you are creating any value, quite the contrary.
You seem to conveniently forget that all of this was "possible" only with heavy borrowing, and it looks like many countries won't be able to even pay the principal soon enough.
When you take this into account, the "growth" has been negative for over 10 years, and it was barely stagnant for quite a while before.
We exported the growth and manipulated money, now the truth appear. You can only pretend for so long.
The reality is that the value creating has been quite low in most of the EU and now that the economic engine that was Germany has stalled, everything is grinding to a halt.
Germany had heavy reliance on cheap Russian gas for its chemical industry and premium car market, both are getting disrupted massively. It's actually a perfect example on why we should avoid too much reliance on other countries. The hilarious part is that in the meantime, Germany was giving "ecology" lessons to all their neighbors and the world at large. In typical arrogant German fashion, they had everything figured out, until they didn't, that is. They actually hold a lot of responsibility for their terrible leadership on the EU.
It's simple: global trade is good, isolationism is bad. It's as simple as that.
The “EU common classes” don't want higher prices or poorer services. This is a fact that the US's elites in power will soon discover. And it's easy to see why this trend is a train wreck in progress: unemployment, in both the US and EU, is at an all-time low, and if you significantly lower imports via tariffs and economic wars, who do you think will work on those local products and services? Never mind that US's investments and exports are also crashing as a direct result of this administration's policies, so I'm guessing they rely on future software developers that end up unemployed to become lumberjacks.
But yes, now that the US is no longer a trustworthy ally, I want the EU to cut its tech dependencies from it for as much as possible, while strengthening ties with all of our other allies, such as Canada, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, India. There's no conflict in this reasoning.