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Macron bemoans US-EU trade deal, says European Union needs to be ‘feared’

By Brady Knox July 30, 2025 | updated 3 days ago

French President Emmanuel Macron expressed his fury at the recent U.S.-EU trade deal during a Wednesday Cabinet meeting, arguing that it had been reached because the bloc was not “feared enough.”

The deal was announced on Sunday, with terms widely viewed as heavily favoring the United States at the detriment of the European Union. It was widely decried in France, but it noticeably did not draw an immediate reaction from Macron himself. That changed on Wednesday, when he voiced his frustrations with the deal at a Cabinet meeting.

“Europe does not yet see itself sufficiently as a power,” he said, according to multiple outlets. “To be free, you have to be feared. We have not been feared enough.”

However, Macron gave an optimistic message, suggesting that the deal wasn’t the “end of the story” and that a better deal could still be reached.

“France has always taken a firm and demanding stance,” he said, adding that this stance would continue.

French Prime Minister François Bayrou gave a much more alarmist statement on Monday, saying it was “a dark day when an alliance of free peoples, gathered to affirm their values and defend their interests, resolves to submit.”

The U.S.-EU trade deal included 15% tariffs levied on nearly all EU exports, in addition to the EU investing $600 billion in the U.S. above current levels. The EU will also purchase $750 billion of U.S. energy.

The deal was denounced across the political spectrum in France as capitulating to the U.S. Macron’s foremost rival, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, called it a “moral fiasco.”

“The trade agreement concluded by Ursula von der Leyen with Donald Trump is a political, economic, and moral fiasco,” she wrote. “The least that could be done is to acknowledge this stinging failure rather than asking the French, who will be its first victims, to rejoice in it.”

Benjamin Haddad, France’s minister in charge of European affairs, urged the EU to take retaliatory measures in response, such as taxing U.S. digital services or excluding U.S. tech companies from public contracts.

“The free trade that has brought shared prosperity to both sides of the Atlantic since the end of the Second World War is now being rejected by the United States, which has opted for economic coercion and complete disregard for W.T.O. rules,” he wrote Monday. “We must quickly draw the necessary conclusions or risk being wiped out.”

Other EU leaders expressed cautious approval of the deal, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

The deal marks perhaps Trump’s greatest trade victory, soothing skeptics riled by the market turbulence caused by his initial “Liberation Day” tariff announcement in April.

Wolfgang Niedermark, a board member at Germany’s largest industry trade organization, argued that the poor deal came about due to the EU’s poor competitiveness.

“The EU commission simply did not have a good negotiating position,” he told the Financial Times.

US-EUROPE TRADE DEAL ‘EXTRAORDINARY EVOLUTION’ IN TRUMP USE OF TARIFFS

One ambassador told the outlet that the EU was rolled over by the Trump juggernaut.

“Trump worked out exactly where our pain threshold is,” they said.

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