Oh, look. The Continent has finally stopped staring at its own navel long enough to notice it’s being kicked in the teeth. Grégoire Roos, a man paid to have expensive opinions at Chatham House—the intellectual equivalent of a retirement home for people who think they can still influence history—has emerged from the mahogany shadows to tell us that Europe can 'weaponise' its economy. It’s a delightful sentiment, really. It’s like watching a toddler discover they can throw their mashed peas at the wall; it’s messy, annoying, and ultimately changes absolutely nothing about the power dynamic in the room. This sudden epiphany that the 'Single Market' is a tool of power rather than just a massive bureaucratic paperweight is the kind of 'breakthrough' that only occurs to people who have spent their entire lives shielded from the harsh realities of global thuggery by a thick layer of taxpayer-funded Brie.

For decades, the European Union has treated the Single Market as a sacred temple of regulations, a place where bureaucrats go to die and where the curvature of a banana is more strictly monitored than the integrity of their own borders. But now, with the orange cloud of Donald Trump looming over the Atlantic again like a sentient, spray-tanned storm system, the grey suits in Brussels have had a collective revelation. They’ve realized that being the world’s biggest consumer block actually means people might want to sell things to them. Groundbreaking. Revolutionary. It only took them forty years and the threat of total economic irrelevance to figure it out. Roos speaks of a 'convergence in messaging' among EU leaders, which is the polite way of saying that twenty-seven different countries have finally agreed on a single lie to tell the Americans.

They want to show Trump that they are strong, that they have 'dependencies' they can exploit. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of a nerd telling a bully that his glasses are actually very expensive and if they break, the bully’s dad will have to pay for them. It’s pathetic. The EU is essentially a collection of nations that can’t even agree on a common defense budget or a coherent energy policy, yet they expect the world to believe they’re going to coordinate a sophisticated economic strike against the largest economy on the planet. The 'weapon' they speak of is more like a Rube Goldberg machine where the final action is a polite letter of protest delivered three weeks too late in three different languages, none of which Trump bothers to read.

On one side of this farce, we have the MAGA crowd, whose understanding of global trade begins and ends with the word 'tariffs'—a word they seem to treat as a magic spell that makes money appear out of thin air rather than a tax on their own citizens. They view the world as a zero-sum game played on a golden golf course where everyone else is cheating. On the other side, we have the EU leadership, a group of people who genuinely believe that if they just write enough white papers and hold enough summits in Versailles, the laws of physics and economics will eventually bend to their collective will. It’s a battle between moronic greed and performative competence. Neither side is actually interested in the well-being of their citizens; they’re just jockeying for position in a race to the bottom of the trash heap of history.

Roos says they have 'taken the full measure of the power on which they have been sitting for so long.' This is intellectual speak for 'we finally realized we were sitting on the remote.' The arrogance is staggering. The idea that the EU is just now 'buying time' implies that time is a currency they can still afford to spend. While Brussels debates the ethics of carbon-neutral staplers and the precise definition of 'strategic autonomy,' the rest of the world has already moved on. China is buying up the ports, the U.S. is fracturing into a collection of angry corporate fiefdoms, and Russia is proving that a few million shells are worth more than a thousand trade agreements.

The 'dependencies' Roos mentions are a two-edged sword that the EU has spent decades sharpening against its own throat. They talk about how the world needs the single market, but they fail to mention how much the single market needs the world to remain stable—a stability that the EU has done precisely nothing to maintain. They’ve offshored their energy to Moscow, their security to Washington, and their manufacturing to Beijing. Now, they want to 'weaponize' what’s left? It’s like a man who has sold his arms and legs suddenly threatening to win a boxing match. The sheer delusion required to think that the EU can suddenly pivot from a soft-power non-entity to an economic powerhouse is the kind of madness only found in high-level think tanks. Trump isn't the cause of this rot; he’s just the vulture circling the corpse. And the 'experts' like Roos are just the people narrating the decay, pretending that the twitching of the limbs is a sign of newfound strength. We are all doomed to watch this slap-fight while the world actually burns, and the only 'weapon' anyone is actually using is the one pointed at their own head.