It’s time the EU realized US’ anti-free trade characteristics

European Council President Donald Tusk’s weekly agenda shows he will discuss only routine affairs with US President Donald Trump at the NATO summit in Brussels on Wednesday and Thursday. And there are no signs yet to suggest the European Union and the Trump administration will hold their first summit in the near future.

The reason for Trump’s reluctance to hold a US-EU summit could be attributed to his discomfort with the idea of European integration. He even urged France recently to leave the bloc.

Although EU leaders expected a EU-US summit to be held at the earliest given the importance of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, Trump didn’t show any inclination to do so. Now, even the EU is not pushing forward the TTIP agenda.

Trump visited Brussels in May 2017 but just held a short meeting with top European leaders on the sidelines of the NATO summit. And although he will visit Brussels for the two-day NATO summit again this week, no separate meeting with the EU leaders is scheduled, at least so far. Perhaps because their meeting at the G7 summit in Canada last month was anything but successful, they don’t want to go through the same experience again. But in protocol terms, this is unusual. The EU boasts 500 million consumers and its collective economic clout is greater than that of the United States. Traditionally, theirs has been the closest partnership in the world; more importantly, such a meeting is necessary when the US president is visiting the EU headquarters.

During my almost eight-year stay in Brussels,

And to do that successfully, the EU must know which economy represents fairness in trade and which opposes it by launching trade wars.