Comparing the US with the EU is wrongheaded. I never understood why people thought the two are comparable. They're not. The US is a single country that started with a blank slate, grew through the assimilation of immigrants, with its citizens sharing a single fate. Europe is a collection of nation states that some thought could be united into a federation en masse. The problem is that these countries do not share fate and through geopolitical necessity have incompatible interests. This is a drastically different situation than the occasional regional squabbling you see in the US. There seems to be this obnoxious tendency to give Germany a free pass, but Germany has itself demonstrated a lack of solidarity with and genuine consideration for the interests of others. Energy solidarity was made a mockery as soon as Germany went NordStream. Fair representation in the EU was destroyed when Penrose voting was tossed out in favor of proportional voting (making Germany unassailable hegemon). Common foreign policy was killed when Germany dragged its feet with Ukraine. The Schengen zone was rendered absurd through the German mismanagement of the migrant crisis. The Eurozone crisis needs no further explanation.

Furthermore, people keep talking about the free trade zone as if they were children and the word "free" were a piece of candy. Free trade is not an absolute good and not a great thing when it stifles a country's growth. The US became an economic superpower not because of free trade but because of protectionism. Had the fledgling country engaged in free trade, sure, its consumers might have ended up with greater access to the world's markets, but it also would never have become an economic powerhouse. That's because preexisting industrial powers would have flooded the market with goods and stifled the formation of an American economic base. Maybe the US would have become a place for outsourcing of some kind, like an economic colony of sorts. Even today, the US is the world's most protectionist country. The only reason we hear so much talk of free trade is because as the unrivaled economic superpower of the world, it can easily flood weaker markets with its products. This renders these markets de facto economic colonies of the US (btw, "Chinese" manufacturing is really outsourced American manufacturing). For the same reason, the EU poses a threat to the proper formation of a strong post-Cold War economic base in the countries of Central Europe. There is a great disparity between members of the EU. I remember in 2003-04, Andrzej Sadowski of the Adam Smith Institute in Warsaw said that membership in the EU may be beneficial for Poland in the future, but that at the time, it was premature, that Poland needed to build up its economic base and bring it to level comparable to those in countries to the West of it so that it could compete with them. As it stands, Germany profits from this disparity because it has access to cheap labor, and the EU functions as a means to maintain that status quo. It also needs the free trade zone so that it can export its product without suffering tariffs. Unlike the US, without export, Germany is dead.

It's all too easy for Americans and wealthy Western countries to rattle on about free trade and the like when it is they that stand to benefit from it the most. The US has an empire to run and the wealthy Western powers want regional or even international dominance of some kind. They simply do it under a blanket of mendacious bromides about "unity" and "prosperity". Bollocks! The geopolitical tectonic plates are starting to shift and a new power balance will result from it along fault lines that are there and have been there. One ought to respect those fault lines instead of trying to build a Disneyland over it, believing that you can hold it all together through the power of positive thinking and vacuous mantras.