Save Europe, Save Ourselves: THE CASE FOR A PROGRESSIVE ATLANTIC TRADE ALLIANCE.

• Author: Block, Daniel
• Position: Cover story

It is difficult to overstate the dangers facing Europe. A hopelessly divided Britain is on the verge of crashing out of the European Union with no deal, risking economic turmoil, medicine shortages, and conflict in Northern Ireland. Aspiring autocrats lead governments in Poland and Hungary--once models of democratization. An angry populist movement with incoherent demands is wreaking havoc in France. A predatory Russia feeds these trends using everything from Twitter bots to assassins.

Seven decades of peace and prosperity have made it too easy to forget what happens when Europe divides. More than 100 million people, half a million of them Americans, were killed during World War I and World War II. Those two conflicts capped centuries of nearly nonstop war, conquest, and revolution. The continent's recent stability is the exception, not the rule.

The peace stems largely from American foreign policy. The United States was essential to defeating the continent's fascist powers during World War II, helped revive its economy with the Marshall Plan, and now safeguards its security through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. When the Balkans descended into war in the 1990s, it took American military action, through NATO, to end the bloodshed.

Donald Trump has ignored this history. He has abandoned pacts that the EU values, like the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Iran nuclear deal. He has lobbed insults at the bloc's leaders, tweeting that French President Emmanuel Macron "suffers from a very low Approval Rating" and that "the people of Germany are turning against" Chancellor Angela Merkel. He has even threatened to withdraw from NATO.

The president's actions have rocked Europe's confidence in the U.S. Last year, Merkel remarked that "it's no longer the case that the United States will simply just protect us." Macron called for a European army to safe guard the continent from "China, Russia, and even the United States of America." The president's behavior has created openings for the Kremlin, which is forging political and financial alliances with increasingly powerful far-right parties across the continent.

But the fracturing of Europe predates Trump, and it will likely outlast him. Extreme nationalist parties have made steady gains in EU parliamentary elections. Unchecked, they will win control of more European countries, and they will use their authority to persecute minorities, weaken civil society, and perhaps even rip the union apart. Given the continent's history, that's a scary prospect. The United States needs new ways to bind European states to each other, to America, and to liberal democratic values.

Here's one: establish a large, powerful trade agreement with the European Union. Call it the Atlantic Alliance. If implemented, it would bring Europe and America closer together by making them part of the largest free trade zone in the world.

Proposing a new free trade deal in 2019 might sound backward. Recent trade agreements have been archetypes of the runaway free market-ism that produced the very inequality fueling nationalist backlash on both sides of the Atlantic. There's a reason that Trump ran--and won--on a stridently anti-trade platform. And indeed, the deal that policymakers have already proposed, called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), shows the flaws of the existing system. It's designed to liberalize the flow of capital without serious respect for the consequences. Like trade agreements past, it would establish international tribunals that let corporations challenge and undermine the regulations of sovereign states.

But there's no reason why a new deal with Europe has to follow this discredited template. Tariffs between the U.S. and Europe are already low. The Atlantic Alliance would lower them further not as an end in itself, but as a means of reinforcing strategic ties and strengthening liberal values.

For American liberals, a deal with Europe could advance domestic progressive policies. Unlike the Asian and Latin American partners in past trade agreements, European countries have labor and environmental standards that tend to be stronger than ours. A...