Comment by nbardy

That's because not everyone thinks that the trade deals were lop-sided, and it's difficult to objectively determine if they are, given that trade deals are just another lever in the relationship between 2 countries, one lever among millions of levers, one that is constantly calibrated and moved depending on the other ones. In a system like this I think it's pretty difficult to say who's getting more and who's getting less. But Trump doesn't care what is true of false, so for him it's easy to just say what suits him best.

Regarding the war, I can assure you that Trump not excluding to take Greenland my force has been seen by the EU as threat of starting a war, giving that Greenland is part of the EU. Also applying tariffs when European NATO countries sent some troops in Greenland has been perceived as: "Trump wanted to invade Greenland, he felt like EU countries wanted to defend it, so he imposed tariffs because he wanted to invade".

I'm not saying everyone in EU is thinking this, but I think a lot of people did, and this is some context for you to try and understand europe's point of view.

>They act like we’re going to war with them when we’re asking for parity and for their self reliance to increase.

The US is literally threatening to invade an EU overseas territory.

Comrade, what is the weather in St. Petersburg?

> They should probably fund their military first.

They should do both. Resilience must be achieved in depth.

> It’s petulant the way the EU is throwing a hissy fit after we’ve had lop-sided trade deals for years and funding the entire NATO alliance ourselves.

Most of the outrage in the EU right now is about Trump's threats against another NATO country (Denmark / Greenland). The funding of the NATO has been slowly shifting for a few years already.

If you’re honestly OK with the maths Trump used to calculate the trade deficits then I’m not really sure you’re going to fit in here at HN.