Eight NATO allies condemn tariff threat as the European Union pauses a US trade deal.

Eight countries. One statement. Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The signatures came in over Saturday night and the joint statement went out Sunday. Europe will not be blackmailed, said the Danish prime minister, in English, on camera, in case anybody was unclear about the audience.

Hon. Hon, hon. I want you to imagine you are a small business owner. You have eight customers. The eight customers, between them, are most of your business. You wake up Saturday morning and you have decided, for reasons known only to you, to slap a 10 percent surcharge on each of those eight customers, with the surcharge rising to 25 percent in June, until each of the eight customers agrees to help you buy a third-party island that none of them owns and that is not legally for sale. You announce the surcharge from your home office on Saturday night. Sunday morning the eight customers issue a joint letter saying you are insane.

Monday they cancel the order they had open with you.

That is the European Union pausing the trade deal it had been working on with the United States. The trade deal that was supposed to lower tariffs in both directions and that had been on track to clear the European Parliament in March. The deal is, as of Sunday afternoon, on hold. The phrase the Europeans use is technical pause. The phrase your accountant uses is we lost the contract.

The British, who have spent five hundred years inventing diplomatic vocabulary for these moments, used the phrase very serious concern. The Norwegians, whose foreign ministry doesn’t usually issue same-day statements, issued a same-day statement. The French foreign minister used the word unacceptable. The Dutch one used escalation. The Germans used partner. The Germans calling the United States a partner in the same paragraph as a tariff threat is the diplomatic equivalent of starting a sentence with with all due respect.

You ever notice how every time the country starts a fight with eight allies at once, the country is supposed to be the one who’s right and the eight allies are supposed to be the ones who don’t get it. Eight to one. That’s not a math you usually want to be on the wrong side of. Mrs. Pennington had a worksheet for this.

The administration’s position, as of Sunday afternoon, was that the response from the eight was an “overreaction.” The eight, in turn, were on the cover of their own newspapers, with the President’s face above the tariff line, and very serious headlines underneath.

That ought to concern you.