As my wife says, “You can lead a horse to water but that won’t make him into a duck.” There’s a tragicomic quality to Joseph Sternberg’s advice to European leaders in the Wall Street Journal:
Not to jinx it, but Donald Trump’s second term is off to a good start—for Europe. Mr. Trump already has created enormous political and economic opportunities for the Continent if, and this is a huge if, any European politicians have the wit to seize their chance.
Amid the blizzard of executive orders and other actions that began on Monday, four matters are of particular relevance across the Atlantic. The Trump administration is withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate, scrapping Biden-era electric-vehicle mandates, ramping up American fossil-fuel production, and killing off a global corporate-tax agreement.
The first instinct of establishment European politicians and their media enablers is to interpret these steps as affronts to Europe. Which they are. Mr. Trump’s abandonment of the decade-old global climate agreement is as strong a signal as Washington can send that the new administration doesn’t care about an issue that Europeans have come to understand in quasireligious terms. All the promised drilling, and new internal-combustion cars, adds insult to this injury. Withdrawal from the major tax deal negotiated at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development demonstrates that the new administration is indifferent to European governments’ desperate search for new revenue sources.
Note, however, that Mr. Trump at least isn’t perpetuating the far bigger affront President Biden committed against our European friends: lying to them.
and concludes:
Europe can’t afford its climate commitments, whether the cost is measured in subsidies disbursed by cash-strapped governments or economic growth forgone. Yet European voters remain stubbornly committed to the policy goal for which they no longer want to pay. Mr. Trump is offering an off-ramp for politicians struggling to manage this cognitive dissonance. Expect Europe’s reversals on climate policy to be presented—more in sorrow than in anger, mind you—as unavoidable results of the economic pressures arising from America’s own climate-policy shift.
Likewise with the tax pact, which was intended to forestall precisely the sorts of tax reforms European countries need to help revive their flailing economies. By pulling the U.S. out of this attempt at global tax harmonization, Mr. Trump restores tax policy—and, specifically, tax competition—as a lever available to European politicians grasping for new economic-growth strategies.
Those are the sticks, and there are carrots too. An effect of the end of electric-vehicle mandates in America is that the world’s largest economy has again become an enormous market for the internal-combustion autos European companies can manufacture profitably. This is a lifeline to German automakers in particular, even after accounting for the threat of Trump tariffs on Mexico, where many European firms now manufacture cars. Meanwhile, the single most beneficial thing anyone could do for Europe right now would be to revive American energy production, which would boost U.S. economic growth and offer knock-on benefits in global energy markets. And behold, it’s happening.
Europeans may never learn to love Mr. Trump, but if they’re smart, they’ll learn to take “yes” for an answer when he offers it.
I need to remind Mr. Sternberg of German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s observation to the effect that European politicians know what needs to be done, they just don’t know how they’ll keep their jobs if they do it. They can’t reverse course without confessing they’ve been pushing the continent in the wrong direction for twenty years and they can’t do that without acknowledging they’ve been wrong. So they won’t.
It will be up to some other group of European leaders which is why there’s so much ferment in Europe right now.
Meanwhile, Trump threatens military action against Denmark over Greenland.