Trump’s Transatlantic Impaired Partnership
The two shores, and lands, of the North Atlantic – the Eastern and the Western ones – are subject to a movement where, metaphorically speaking, the economy tries to beat the geography, while politics seem to team up either with the first one or with the second. The name of the game is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – TTIP –, the famously hard-to-get deal between the US and EU, whose first official round of talks began in 2013, with the intention to bring about lower trade tariffs and to reduce regulatory barriers that make exchanges between the US and the EU more costly than they should. Geophysics literally distances America from Europe, the orogenesis of the Mid-Atlantic ridge pushing aside the tectonic plates where “the new world” and “the old continent” sit. More