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Notes -
You reversed the incentive structure of cutting a deal.
The issue with this framing is that in the non-hypothetical the EU is already getting bent over a barrel by China. This is most notable in the field of green technology (solar panels, EVs, etc.), where for a lot of notable (and sometimes ethically questionable) reasons the Chinese state owned / backed enterprises have cornered the European markets in fields that the Europeans a decade or so thought they would dominate. Moreover, the expectation of China as a forever growth market has given way to the general recognition of PRC mercantilist strategy of IP theft and domestic protectionism, which limits than reverses chinese market share of industrial production, i.e. the great big German hope.
There are other fields and contexts as well, but the construct of a guaranteed versus uncertain screwing has since been passed by the paradigm that Europe is already getting screwed by the one that is presented as the hypothetical lesser risk.
As such, this framing should be reversed for understanding the actor perspectives. There is no choice about Europe being bent over a barrel now- it's already happening- but it's already happening with the Chinese, whereas the potential US risk may be mitigated by cutting a deal.
This confuses money flows between various actors, which undermine the monetary argument.
The 2022 China-EU trade balance was roughly 390 billion Euros in China's favor. The 2022 US-EU trade balance was about 130 billion in the EU's favor. Europe is already dealing with a transactional power, and paying quite a bit for the privilege.
The issue with your framing is that you neglect a third and more relevant patron-client relationship: the protectorate. In a protectorate relationship, the patron party subsidizes the client rather than extracts the resources. In the US-European context, this subsidy has been through granting the Europeans favorable access to US markets without reciprocity for US firms to access European markets since the early Cold War.
While in economic terms there is no meaningful difference between raising taxes or decreasing subsidies, in diplomatic terms there is a difference between demanding money and offering less of it.
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