Brussels closed four trade negotiations in the seven months to March

The case Foreign Affairs makes for Brussels rests on reliability. Four negotiations closed inside a seven-month span, from Indonesia in September to Australia in March ^[22]. The piece reports all four as concluded, and the essay does not include ratification or entry-into-force dates ^[23]. Its argument is about the character of the process: "although the EU is relatively slow moving, the agreements it signs are dependable," the essay says ^[6]. It also calls the pace unprecedented and partly a response to U.S. volatility ^[17].

The U.S. numbers in the same piece pull more than one way. The 2025 goods deficit was a record $1.24 trillion, set with the highest effective tariff rate in generations ^[11]. July came in at $119.60 billion, which the essay puts 31 percent above the trailing 12-month average ^[12]. Work backwards and that average is about $91 billion a month ^[18], while 2025 as a whole averaged about $103 billion ^[19]. So the year to July ran roughly 12 percent below the 2025 monthly pace ^[21], and July alone ran about 16 percent above it ^[20].

What made the U.S. terms movable is in the essay's own account. The framework agreements were executive actions, unratified by Congress and built on legal authorities the courts were already contesting ^[8]. The United Kingdom had offered concessions to secure a deal and, according to the piece, found itself no more certain of the terms than before ^[10].

The commercial side of the essay sits separately from the membership queue. It counts scores of other countries seeking closer economic ties with Brussels ^[25], and the UK, which left in 2020, is spending considerable political capital trying to rebuild the economic relationship it forfeited ^[4]. Iceland went the other way. Its voters narrowly declined in August to reopen negotiations, 52.8 percent to 47.2 percent, having already secured many of the benefits through the European Economic Area ^[3].

For a firm deciding this quarter which rulebook to design compliance against, the record speaks to how long terms last. Companies do not build factories on a 90-day tariff pause or on a framework whose terms may not survive the next executive order, Foreign Affairs argues ^[24]. Manufacturing shed tens of thousands of jobs through much of 2025, began a modest recovery in 2026, and total employment remains only marginally above where it stood when the tariffs took effect ^[14].