The irony has not been lost on European policymakers. As U.S. President Donald Trump desperately casts about for a 51st state—Canada, Greenland, and Panama all said no this past year—the European Union’s membership queue is the longest it has been in decades. Despite the Trump administration’s accusations of civilizational decline in Europe, EU accession negotiations are advancing with an urgency not seen since the bloc’s last major expansion in 2004. Nine countries hold official EU candidate status, including Moldova, Montenegro, and Ukraine. Others are considering it, too. In a referendum in August, Iceland, which is already in the European Economic Area and enjoys many of the benefits of EU membership, narrowly voted not to reopen negotiations to join the bloc, 52.8 percent to 47.2 percent. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, which left the European Union in 2020, is spending considerable political capital trying to rebuild the economic relationship it forfeited when it left.

Scores of other countries, meanwhile, are seeking closer economic ties with Brussels. The EU concluded trade negotiations with India and the South American trading bloc Mercosur in January, with Australia in March, and with Indonesia last September. This pace of new economic deals is unprecedented and partly a response to U.S. volatility. But it also reveals a rising global recognition that although the EU is relatively slow moving, the agreements it signs are dependable. Its bureaucratic process and institutional lethargy are proving, unexpectedly, to be an asset in an age of instability.

Trump came to office in January 2025 with a new theory of U.S. economic leverage. The United States is the world’s largest import market. Trading partners, he reasoned, needed access to U.S. consumers more than the United States needed access to their goods. That imbalance, if exploited with sufficient force, would produce concessions on trade flows, investment, and the rules governing global competition. His means of applying this force was tariffs, which were deployed at a speed and scale that rattled global markets.

Initially, it seemed that U.S. economic leverage had been judged correctly, since numerous framework agreements followed. But these were the product of executive actions—unratified by Congress and built on legal authorities that the courts were already contesting. When the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs unlawful in February, the administration replaced them with those empowered under a different statutory authority. Countries such as the United Kingdom, which had offered concessions to secure a deal, found themselves no more certain of the terms than before. It was becoming clear that U.S. trade policy could and would change overnight. The volatility that was supposed to generate leverage became instead a permanent condition, undermining the U.S. position.

Indeed, a year on, the results are not what the president predicted. The U.S. goods trade deficit reached a record $1.24 trillion in 2025, despite the highest effective tariff rate in generations. The deficit narrowed somewhat in the early months of 2026 but widened in July to $119.60 billion, 31 percent above the 12-month average. The tariffs did shift where Americans buy goods, and the deficit with China has fallen. But much of that trade was simply diverted rather than reduced—the three largest U.S. goods deficits are now with Mexico, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

The promised reshoring, meanwhile, has not arrived. Manufacturing shed tens of thousands of jobs through much of 2025, and although the sector has begun a modest recovery in 2026, total employment remains only marginally above where it stood when the tariffs took effect. Companies, it is now apparent, do not build factories on the basis of a 90-day tariff pause or a framework whose terms may not survive the next executive order. Again, the uncertainty that was supposed to generate leverage backfired. More than three-quarters of manufacturers surveyed through 2025 by the National Association of Manufacturers cited trade policy uncertainty as their top concern.

Trading partners have drawn their own conclusions. Canada, the United States’ largest trading partner, suspended trade negotiations in August after the administration introduced last-minute demands, which Prime Minister Mark Carney described as uneconomic and unfair. In explaining his decision to walk away, Carney said that the U.S. approach had “called into question the reliability of any deal.” Governments and investors must now permanently price in the risk of U.S. executive discretion. Regardless of who wins the presidency in 2028, formal trade agreements with the United States no longer offer any certainty that the specifics will remain unchanged over the medium term.

A growing number of countries, confronted by the uncertainty........

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