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The Long Negotiation
It happened in Asunción
It happened in Asunción — the kind of ending that takes twenty-five years to arrive, which is to say, the kind that makes you wonder if it was ever really meant to happen at all. The agreement was signed in Paraguay, in a room where no doubt the air conditioning hummed and men in dark suits smiled for photographs, the way they do when something has finally been accomplished, or when they want you to believe it has.
You might call it a free trade agreement between the European Union and Mercosur, but that would be like calling a marriage a contract, which it is, of course, but not only that. What they were really doing — what Ursula von der Leyen understood when she spoke of strategic importance and fair trade — was drawing a map of who matters to whom in a world where the Americans and Chinese have their own ideas about such things.
It creates, they say, one of the largest free trade zones in the world. Seven hundred million people, a quarter of everything the world makes and sells. The Europeans will buy what South America grows; South America will buy what Europe builds. Ninety percent of the tariffs will disappear, just like that, though some will take ten or fifteen years to fade, the way old resentments do in families, gradually and with great reluctance.
