Bananas Are the Beginning by David Pryce-JonesThe looming war between America and Europe.

A TRADE war between the United States and Europe over bananas grown elsewhere, for heaven’s sake! The summoning of ambassadors, hot-line telephone calls, punitive tariffs, convenings in the halls of Geneva (that ill-fated home of lost peace)! This might appropriately provide a theme for a comic opera, with chorus girls in yellow tutus and soldiers singing “boom, boom, boom” as they fire toy cannons. The issue is palpably absurd. The rights and wrongs of it are about evenly distributed. In the welter of accusations and profit-seeking, neither the banana companies nor the government officials involved emerge with credit. The World Trade Organization exists to arbitrate cases like this according to the principles of free trade, and it ought to be the business of a half-hour.

More than a silly blip, though, these bananas are a cloud no larger than a man’s hand, a warning of what is to come. Just over the horizon, forces have long been mustering that will enlarge that cloud into a storm, with every potential for historic disaster. The United States and Europe are at a parting of the ways. A political bloc is emerging in the form of the European Union that likes to see itself as a challenge to America. Europe gave the world Nazism and Communism, and out of the same vicious old matrix another doctrinaire cause has come alive.

About the Author

David Pryce-Jones

David Pryce-Jones (1936–2025) was a British author and commentator and served as a senior editor of National Review.

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World Trade Organization

A TRADE war between the United States and Europe over bananas grown elsewhere, for heaven’s sake! The summoning of ambassadors, hot-line telephone calls, punitive tariffs, convenings in the halls of Geneva (that ill-fated home of lost peace)! This might appropriately provide a theme for a comic opera, with chorus girls in yellow tutus and soldiers singing “boom, boom, boom” as they fire toy cannons. The issue is palpably absurd. The rights and wrongs of it are about evenly distributed. In the welter of accusations and profit-seeking, neither the banana companies nor the government officials involved emerge with credit. The World Trade Organization exists to arbitrate cases like this according to the principles of free trade, and it ought to be the business of a half-hour.

More than a silly blip, though, these bananas are a cloud no larger than a man’s hand, a warning of what is to come. Just over the horizon, forces have long been mustering that will enlarge that cloud into a storm, with every potential for historic disaster. The United States and Europe are at a parting of the ways. A political bloc is emerging in the form of the European Union that likes to see itself as a challenge to America. Europe gave the world Nazism and Communism, and out of the same vicious old matrix another doctrinaire cause has come alive.