Europe (and Canada’s)
smart answer to tariffs

Turning every trade punch into a stronger economic balance

By Andrew Burlone

January 18, 2026

Europe and Canada should be brutally realistic: the age of “reasonable” Republicans quietly restraining Donald Trump is over, and waiting for grown‑ups in Washington is not a strategy. Instead, they need to use their own market power to create political pain where it really counts inside the United States—among upper‑middle‑class Americans and the small circle of “amerigarchs” whose fortunes, routines, and status symbols depend on frictionless transatlantic travel, finance, and access to high‑end European and Canadian goods. These are the groups that call their representatives in Congress when their lives are disrupted.

“Brussels hold’em” is a metaphor used by European policy analysts to describe how the EU should handle economic coercion from the U.S., especially Trump‑style tariffs. The idea is to treat the situation like a strategic poker game played from Brussels: instead of reacting emotionally to every U.S. move, the EU calmly maps all its cards–tariffs, the Anti‑Coercion Instrument (ACI), digital and environmental regulation, access to the single market, financial and tech rules–and plays them in a calculated way to maximise leverage and deterrence.

Europe and Canada should be brutally realistic: the age of “reasonable” Republicans quietly restraining Donald Trump is over, and waiting for grown‑ups in Washington is not a strategy.

If Washington keeps escalating or is clearly using tariffs as coercion, the EU can then open an Anti‑Coercion Instrument procedure: a Commission investigation, a formal finding of coercion, consultations with the U.S., and the adoption of “response measures” that can go beyond tariffs into services, procurement, finance, and investment.

In this framing, Europe and Canada’s strength lies less in mirroring U.S. tariffs and more in the under‑appreciated power of their regulatory and market tools: tightening product standards, limiting access to public procurement, using climate and chemicals rules, and, where necessary, squeezing U.S. tech and services that depend on their markets. The goal is to build a coherent economic‑power doctrine and play a long game of reducing dependencies and building asymmetric leverage, then choosing moments to act so that U.S. coercion becomes steadily more costly and unattractive, rather than trying to win everything in a single dramatic clash.

Unwinding dependence on America

The most efficient approach is to add a long‑term “repatriation” track for both Europe and Canada, and systematically unwind dependence on American service providers, especially in digital, data, and cloud. The guiding principle is simple: every episode of U.S. economic coercion should automatically speed up the shift of demand away from U.S. firms—cloud, payments, consulting, defence, high‑end data services—toward European, Canadian or other non‑U.S. alternatives.

In that model, anti‑coercion and regulatory tools are designed to deliver a double dividend. In the short run, they impose concentrated costs on American interests with real lobbying clout in Washington; in the long run, they lock “repatriated services” into the system, so that each crisis becomes an opportunity to claw back sovereignty and industrial capacity rather than just another round of damage control.

Rather than acting in a scatter‑shot way, the EU could deploy a calibrated mix of trade, travel and financial measures that look and feel like targeted sanctions blended with an Anti‑Coercion response. That would mean tighter access for American firms to lucrative public contracts, and hard limits on luxury assets and mobility for Trump‑aligned donors, lobbyists and business figures. Used alongside broader diversification and economic‑security policies, this kind of pressure can help turn EU leverage into domestic U.S. political backlash against Trump’s tariffs.

‘The guiding principle is simple: every episode of U.S. economic coercion should automatically speed up the shift of demand away from U.S. firms.’

In practical terms, the Anti‑Coercion Instrument offers a wide palette of responses, including tariffs and quotas, export controls, restrictions on services and investment, procurement bans, and limits on IP or market access. The most efficient tools focus on narrowing access for major American tech players to EU public procurement, capping or prohibiting specific U.S. services in sensitive sectors, declaring that critical domains such as public administration, security, space, and core data infrastructure must be served only by EU‑controlled providers, and gradually attaching special levies or escalating access conditions to dominant U.S. platforms so they become steadily less attractive than European competitors.

This approach turns each episode of U.S. coercion into an automatic trigger: a burst of domestic backlash inside the United States and a structural erosion of the American services footprint in Europe. The result is not just a one‑off act of retaliation, but a gradual, durable rebalancing of the relationship, in which the cost of weaponizing tariffs or other economic tools rises over time for Washington while Europe quietly reduces its own vulnerabilities.

Using ACI as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer

Invoking the ACI directly against the United States would be a dramatic show of resolve, but it would carry serious economic, political, and strategic risks for Europe. The very breadth that makes the instrument powerful—spanning tariffs and quotas, export controls, service restrictions, investment limits, procurement bans, and constraints on IP or market access—makes it a dangerous tool to use against a partner as systemically important as the U.S., since any such move would almost inevitably be read in Washington as an invitation to retaliate in kind.

Because the United States is the EU’s largest trade and investment partner, a serious counter‑strike would likely focus on high‑value European export sectors such as autos, machinery, luxury goods, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals, as well as firms deeply embedded in transatlantic supply chains, precisely when those industries are already absorbing the costs of green and defence transitions and need stability to invest and diversify.

‘Invoking the ACI directly against the United States would be a dramatic show of resolve, but it also carries serious economic, political, and strategic risks for Europe.’

In addition to the direct economic exposure, there is an alliance dimension and a long‑term reputational risk. Moving from deterrence to the real‑world deployment of ACI measures against Washington would risk normalizing a trade‑war mentality within what is still a core security partnership, potentially weakening cooperation on sanctions, defence, climate policy, and tech standards, where European interests often depend on U.S. alignment. Internally, because the ACI relies on qualified‑majority voting and gives significant discretion to the Commission, a showdown with the U.S. could sharpen divides between more protectionist EU member states and export‑heavy, U.S.‑oriented economies, further politicizing EU trade policy.

Over time, repeated or high‑profile ACI use against Washington would also encourage American firms and policymakers to diversify away from European markets, accelerating the fragmentation of trade and regulatory regimes in ways that disproportionately hurt a mid‑sized, trade‑dependent bloc like the EU. This danger is magnified if the instrument comes to be seen less as a shield against coercive rivals and more as a “trade bazooka” aimed primarily at democratic partners, undermining Europe’s ability to rally coalitions against genuine economic bullying by more hostile powers.

Three pillars for a long‑term game

For both Europe and Canada, the smartest path is not to “out‑tariff” Washington, but to combine targeted, carefully calibrated countermeasures with long‑term diversification. The emerging European playbook is to negotiate hard first, but back talks with a credible mix of counter‑tariffs, anti‑coercion tools, and pressure points on U.S. services and big tech—using each clash to reduce strategic reliance on U.S. inputs and infrastructure. Canada is pursuing a similar strategy on a smaller scale: matching U.S. tariffs with well‑chosen counter‑tariffs, keeping actions WTO‑compliant, and cushioning its own firms with tax deferrals, liquidity support, and targeted relief until a settlement restores more normal trade.

In practice, the strategy rests on three mutually reinforcing pillars. First comes calibrated retaliation, not overreaction: instead of lashing out, Europe and Canada draw up tariff hit‑lists that match U.S. measures in value but zero in on goods with plenty of alternative suppliers and maximum political sting in key U.S. districts, creating pressure to negotiate rather than an excuse for endless escalation. Second is structural leverage: tighter rules on U.S. tech, services, procurement and investment access, the “Brussels hold’em” hand that warns Washington that if it turns trade into a weapon, Europe will slowly reroute and repatriate critical services and supply chains, eroding U.S. leverage year after year.

‘For both Europe and Canada, the smartest path is not to “out‑tariff” Washington, but to combine targeted, carefully calibrated countermeasures with long‑term diversification.’

The third pillar is domestic shock absorbers and diversification, which turns short‑term pain into long‑term strength. Europe and Canada pair sharp but targeted countermeasures with tariff‑relief schemes, liquidity backstops and broader economic‑security policies that protect workers and firms while they pivot away from one‑way dependence on the U.S. Each new tariff fight, handled this way, becomes less a crisis than an accelerator: the immediate blow is cushioned, and the underlying economies are pushed one step closer to a more resilient position, progressively harder for Washington to bully with the same tools.

Together, these moves sketch a different kind of transatlantic hardball: one where Europe and Canada neither accept being punching bags nor gamble on blowing up the relationship. Instead, they use every U.S. tariff shock to tighten their grip on access, chip away at one‑sided dependencies, and quietly shift the balance so that, over time, weaponizing trade hurts Washington more than it hurts them.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of WestmountMag.ca.

Featured image: MicroStockHub

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Andrew Burlone, co-founder of WestmountMag.ca, began his media journey at NOUS magazine. Subsequently, he launched Visionnaires, holding the position of creative director for over 30 years. Andrew is passionate about culture and politics, with a keen interest in visual arts and architecture.