From plastic to paper through the tariffs by John Reid

Ah, plastic. Not the kind choking turtles and floating in oceans, but the kind you slap on a café counter for your third cappuccino of the morning. Visa, Mastercard, or perhaps Apple Pay if you’re feeling extra digital. Europe, especially the north, has grown increasingly cashless over the last decade, becoming a sleek, tap-and-go utopia of clean hands and quick checkouts.

But what if Donald Trump, in his second or more emboldened term, decides that his economic aggression needs a little more seasoning, a little more “Make America First Again” juice? And what if he adds to the French wine and German cars the very bloodstream of international commerce: credit?

Let’s take a stroll down the rabbit hole, shall we?

Trump has never hidden his affection for tariffs. For him, they are the economic equivalent of building a wall, visible, defiant, and brashly simple. But unlike physical walls, economic ones strike silently. In his first term, Trump hammered China with tariffs like a 1920s steelworker on overtime. Europe, though diplomatically offended, received only glancing blows.

In round two? Well the last few days we live ...number two and it is brutal.

But tariffs are just the blunt end of the stick. The sharp edge may very well be control over the US-based financial infrastructure that underpins the modern European lifestyle. Mastercard and Visa are not merely "credit card companies." They are data-driven juggernauts with tentacles in nearly every purchase from Reykjavik to Rome. Both are rooted deeply in the American financial system, and more importantly, subject to American political whim.

While Europe pats itself on the back for going green and digital, it has failed to build resilient, sovereign alternatives to Visa and Mastercard. Sure, there’s talk of EPI (European Payments Initiative), and you might occasionally see a local debit card brand on a dusty ATM in the outskirts of Bratislava, but let’s be honest: Visa and Mastercard rule the roost.

That is, until someone like Trump decides they don’t.

With the stroke of a pen or the tap of an angry trueweet, Trump could direct these companies to cut off or restrict services to "uncooperative allies" under the guise of national security, unfair trade practices, or simply for offending him at a G7 dinner. A Trumpian embargo wouldn’t need soldiers or ships just a good old-fashioned financial chokehold.

Imagine waking up in Amsterdam only to realize your cards no longer work, not because of fraud, but because Trump didn’t like Dutch cheese tariffs.

Europe, the same continent where many cafés already frown upon cash, would suddenly find itself scrambling for paper money like a 1980s Soviet queue. Italy might rediscover the joys of la busta, the envelope of cash. Germany would finally feel vindicated for its eternal obsession with Bargeld (cash), and Sweden would be stuck explaining to tourists why their eyeball-payment system doesn’t accept Visa anymore.

We’d witness an ironic reversal: while America charges forward with AI-generated shopping assistants and Bitcoin vending machines, Europe would retrograde into a cash economy, not out of nostalgia but necessity.

The bigger issue here isn’t just economic inconvenience. It’s about sovereignty.

Europe, for all its clever bureaucracy and high-speed trains, is still economically codependent on infrastructure it doesn’t control. In war, in peace, in crisis, the first rule of survival is: control your own supplies. The second rule? Don’t tick off the supplier unless you have a backup plan.

Europe has neither.

If Trump decides that Europe needs “retraining” in economic loyalty, he doesn’t need tanks. He just needs to remind the continent who owns the payment switch. He wouldn’t even need to do it with malice. He could smile, wave, and call it “just business.”

So, will Europe become a museum of cash registers and clinking coins while America locks down the digital flow of commerce?

If Trump has his way, we might all have to dust off the coin purses and practice our counting skills. The continent that pioneered banking might soon be the world’s largest open-air cash exhibition sponsored, ironically, by a man who thinks tariffs are better than treaties and banks are just tools in the art of the deal.

And as the EU scrambles to print banknotes and revive local payment systems, somewhere in Florida, Trump might grin and whisper, “Who's paying now?”