Trump is suggesting that Europe pay more for its own defense, and have the same terms of trade with the US that the US has with Europe. From Andrew Korybko at orientalreview.org:
Trump promised to replace what he termed as “fool trade” with fair trade when it comes to America’s economic partnerships, especially those with NAFTA and the EU.
Tweeting from Singapore after the failed G7 Summit in Canada, the President wrote that “Fair Trade is now to be called Fool Trade if it is not Reciprocal”, before explaining how Canada and Germany “rip off” the US through their own protectionist tariffs and insufficient contributions to NATO, respectively. Trump’s sour that their leaders attacked him for his “Make America Great Again” steel and aluminum tariffs while hypocritically ignoring their own lopsided economic relations with the US, and he believes that now is the time to make right for what he truly believes are the historic wrongs that his predecessors committed in voluntarily handicapping American power. Proverbially speaking, the President conceptualizes America as Gulliver the “giant” tied down by a bunch of Lilliputian dwarves, albeit having previously put itself in this submissive position out of some sort of ideological masochistic-sadism that Trump wants to free it from.
The Cold War-era quid pro quo of the US providing costly security assistance to its NATO allies in order to enable them to concentrate more fully on building their utopian welfare states is no longer relevant because of the changing nature of geopolitics and the rise of asymmetrical threats, though Clinton, Bush, and Obama perpetuated this state of affairs because it advanced the Liberal-Globalist model that all three of them were pursuing at the expense of average Americans. Having entered into office because of the desperation that millions of regular folks in Middle America are experiencing as a result of the domestically catastrophic consequences of globalization on the American Heartland and especially the Midwest, Trump feels obligated to do something about this massive self-inflicted economic wound that’s bleeding hundreds of billions of dollars from the country each year for voluntary reasons that are impossible for this businessman to fathom.
To continue reading: Trump Wants To Free America From “Fool Trade” And Flip The Tables On The EU
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 