In the wake of recent tensions with Europe over U.S. security concerns in Greenland, the European Union suspended its approval of a free trade framework with the United States. Washington should take note and respond with strength.
The EU is acting as if the U.S. is routinely the unreasonable party in the negotiating room, but this is far from the case. For years, America has sat patiently while Europe has tried to run the U.S. economy from afar. While it has exported its Nanny State rules here through trade and regulation, Washington has not tried to micromanage how Europeans live, work, or use their land in return.
The U.S. would be foolish to bend to the EU’s latest trade-delay tactics. Instead, Washington should press harder and use this moment to push back against Brussels’s habit of undermining America’s strong property-rights system in favor of Europe’s weaker regulatory model. Few policies illustrate this problem more clearly than the EU’s so-called deforestation-free regulation.
Passed in 2023, the regulation affects everyday products Americans rely on, such as paper, furniture, beef, coffee, and more. To sell those goods into Europe, companies must prove that the land they used to make it fully meets Europe’s definition of acceptable land use, even when that land is in the U.S. and fully compliant with American law.
In other words, a rule written in Brussels is telling American landowners what they can and cannot do with their property. Prices are, without question, rising for Americans as a result.
When I served in Congress on the Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee, we regularly dealt directly with how land is actually managed in the real world by farmers, ranchers, foresters, and tribal communities who live with the consequences of policy every day. I lived with those same consequences myself growing up on a farm, and I live with them again today as I run a cattle ranch. My work both on the ranch and in Congress has affirmed my long-standing belief that we can promote responsible stewardship while also respecting property rights.
This type of collaboration can generate real results while protecting the economy. Tone-deaf, one-size-fits-all rules that were written thousands of miles away do not. That is why the Executive Office of the President of the United States listed deforestation-free regulation as a technical barrier to trade.
What makes this rule especially hard to justify is that the EU has already admitted that the U.S. does not present much of a deforestation problem at all. In an August 2025 joint trade statement, the EU formally acknowledged that U.S. production poses a negligible risk to global deforestation and committed to working with Washington to avoid undue impacts on U.S.-EU trade.
Why, then, does it continue micromanaging what American farmers and companies are doing with our own land?
Although the EU continues to delay enforcement of the rule, with the last delay announcement coming as recently as Dec. 17, these delays mainly benefit EU-based companies and do little to help U.S. companies. This is because EU importers — knowing they will eventually be legally responsible for compliance — are already shifting that risk by rewriting their contracts with U.S. companies and demanding new attestations.
As such, the impact is already being felt in rural America, especially in timber country. Landowners report being told they may not be able to sell their commodities if they plan to convert harvested land to pasture or crops afterward. In areas with only one or two major buyers, the farmers have no choice but to accept these terms.
Time and time again, Europe has been more than happy to slap barriers on American beef, biotech, and now land-use decisions, while Washington has long played the good neighbor — complying while quietly raising concerns through diplomatic channels and without trying to micromanage Europe’s affairs in return.
But enough is enough. This is the moment for strength, not more patience.
Washington has real leverage right now — after all, the trade talks are frozen because Europe blinked first.
EUROPE SEEKS TO REDUCE RELIANCE ON US FOR ENERGY
It’s time to use that leverage. It’s time to demand that Europe put an end to these perverse, overreaching laws as a condition for resuming trade talks. And it’s time to make it abundantly clear to our European trading partners that the U.S. will not apologize for respecting private property rights, free speech, and the other age-old founding principles that have made this nation great.
That is how America should negotiate — firmly, confidently, and on its own terms.
Chris Stewart is a former member of Congress who served on the Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
