This is CBSI on the world.

I'm John Bachelor.

Trade, free trade, the Trump administration.

I welcome Antonio Kulibashanu, writing for geopolitical futures and analyst.

Importantly, she's the associate professor of geopolitics at the National University for Political Science

and Public Administration in Bucharest, Romania, the Black Sea Basin. She is observing the trade

conversations from Europe, from New Europe, Europe freed of the 20th century burden of the Soviet model.

And now we come to what appears to be the Trumpian model, although there's much of Mr. Biden in the model too when it comes to trade.

And we start in Europe.

Antonio, a very good evening to you.

Germany is going through a bad patch. It's going to have an

election. And though it didn't cause the election, it certainly didn't help that weeks ago

Volkswagen announced the first closings of factories since I believe it was founded before

the Second War and people to be laid off.

And it's shocked the whole nation that Volkswagen, which is the fundamental industry export

that drove Germany's success these many decades, is now pulling back, stepping back, deindustrializing, they call it.

That's one example, but it's the crowning example of the European Union.

And one of the contributors to the doubts in Germany I learn is Mr. Trump's mention that he

intends to impose tariffs on imports from Europe, and that would be luxury automobiles, Mercedes,

are everywhere in America. These tariffs, you write of them most recently, are they understood

in Europe as negotiable? Does Europe understand that this is about Mr. Trump's ability to wean so much of the

world off of depending upon the American markets and to balance the field? How is it understood

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