Despite the European Union possessing a far larger domestic market than Japan, in its trade negotiations with the Trump administration the EU only managed to achieve a similar outcome — matching Japan’s tariff level of 15%, listing comparable categories of imports and pledging nearly an equivalent amount of strategic investments.
As Kazuto Suzuki, director of the Institute of Geoeconomics, wrote in these pages recently, the geoeconomic weight that a certain country has is a combination of three factors, namely: “strategic autonomy,” “indispensability of goods” and “indispensability of market.”
Yet despite the EU’s large consumer market — historically used for exerting “market power” toward third countries — the political and economic union has failed to fully exercise its strengths since the start of the second Trump administration in January and its global influence has since receded.
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