Europe Needs To Step Forward

The Davos forum gave the U.S. a stage to make threats. But the EU’s big challenges predate Trump.

This week’s Davos World Economic Forum, a gathering of major international political and economic leaders, dramatized the enormous geopolitical transformation the world is facing with Donald Trump’s second term.

The harshness with which the U.S. president threatened the European Union generates a logical sense of fear among its member states; however, their response cannot be a lack of self-criticism or inaction.

The EU crisis precedes Trump. His return to the White House offers Europe an opportunity. The alarms that sounded in Davos must give a definitive boost to greater cohesion and strategic autonomy. The EU will only be able to defend the freedoms and values upon which it was founded and that today are at risk from a position of strength.

As expected, Trump grabbed all the attention in Switzerland on Thursday. At the great annual conclave, a symbol of multilateralism in a globalized and interdependent world, the president staged his shift toward transactional alliances determined by the law of the strongest.

Trump threatened to impose tariffs on European countries that do not want to manufacture in the United States and demanded from Brussels a lower tax and regulatory burden for U.S. products. In short, he outlined a foreign policy guided by fierce nationalism and based on blackmail: first, by offering a supposed incentive through “low taxes” and immediately afterward, threatening to punish those who don’t submit to his coercion.

But, beyond Trump’s tone, which is alien to the minimal standards of institutional respect, Davos has confirmed a reality: The EU is experiencing a huge economic and leadership crisis. An “existential crisis,” in the words the European Central Bank’s president, in the face of which there is an urgent need to react without suffering defeatism, but one that is realistic.

Others share that conclusion. Many of the solutions outlined yesterday by Christine Lagarde — a banking union, return of talent, retention of European savings and reinforcement of the single market — are included in the reports in which Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta propose to counteract European decline in the face of American and Chinese strength. Similarly, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva warned that the money “is going to the USA” because of its high productivity and cheap energy. The EU-27, she stressed, is obliged to lessen the “self-inflicted damage” of bureaucracy.

At a time of profound geopolitical change, Europe must recognize the need to reform a project that has given birth to decades of stability and wealth. And to do so, it must first address the shortcomings of foreign dependence in strategic matters and low competitiveness vis-à-vis Beijing and China.

The challenge is immense, as it is for Spain itself. We will not solve it with hollow appeals to the “techno-billionaires” or with the ideological polarization strategy in which our government is engaged. The United States is an essential ally; thus, the Spanish economy has much at stake.