This entire spectacle is yet another demonstration of the sheer destructiveness and moral bankruptcy of state-driven trade policy. Tariffs—whether 15% or 30%, “negotiated” or threatened—are nothing but economic violence wielded by politicians intoxicated by power. Trump using tariffs as a “bargaining tool” to extract concessions doesn’t make for clever negotiation; it’s legalized extortion, punishing consumers and producers for political gain. As Hayek made painfully clear, the pretense of knowledge—the belief that central authorities can dictate complex commercial relationships—inevitably leads to chaos and uncertainty. No politician or bureaucrat, American or European, has the information or the right to override the decentralized decisions of countless individuals engaging in voluntary exchange.

Nozick would see this as the paradigmatic violation of individual liberty. When states intervene with tariffs, they forcibly prevent people from trading peacefully. Such coercion cannot be justified on the grounds of “the public good,” a statist mirage always invoked to conceal private interests and cronyism. The so-called “sovereignty” being defended here is simply the nation-state’s sovereignty to dominate your choices. Whether it’s the US government “strategically” targeting Canada or Brazil, or the EU threatening its own forms of retaliation—from digital taxes to outright bans—this is gangsterism in suits. Both sides are united in the belief that your life and labor are pawns in their economic power games.

Ayn Rand would recognize these “concessions” and trade-offs as the morality of the looter and the moocher, not of rational men. If the EU or the US were led by moral principles, they would unilaterally abolish all coercive restrictions on trade. Imagine a world where EU citizens could buy American goods, or Americans European cars and medicine, free of artificial barriers. Both sides speak of “damage avoided” or “sovereignty protected” while treating producers and consumers like hostages in their squalid schemes.

Trade is not war. Each escalation of tariffs, each new regulatory “instrument,” serves only to make us all poorer, less free, and more vulnerable to the whims of those in power. As always, the state—left or right—remains the enemy of human flourishing. The answer is not in tweaking tariffs or threatening new forms of retaliation, but in the radical, principled abolition of all such statist interventions. Let individuals trade and innovate freely, and let the tinpot planners—on both sides of the Atlantic—disappear into the irrelevance they so richly deserve.