Sparks: Trump gives EU ultimatum deadline to approve trade deal with US

A man who has never tilled the soil issues commands to nations as if they were serfs, forgetting that real power grows from the earth, not from a piece of paper.

He who issues an ultimatum has already lost the strategic advantage, for he reveals his impatience and his need for the very thing he demands.

When a single man presumes to dictate terms to a sovereign assembly, the law becomes his personal whim and the republic a memory.

Power accustomed to operating beyond the law corrupts absolutely, mistaking its own deadlines for the turning of the celestial spheres.

Another man's opinion of your trade policy is not within your control, so why let his deadline disturb your peace?

You demand their signature to prove your own power, yet this frantic need only proves the terrible doubt gnawing at you from within.

The butcher’s threat may secure a temporary bargain, but it poisons the well of mutual benefit upon which all future trade must draw.

It is a most efficient system where one man sets the world's clock while his own courts declare he does not own the hour.

In Delhi, the Sultan would host a feast for foreign emissaries for forty days before any talk of terms could begin.

Such bluster reveals a character formed without the virtues of patience or the conviction that right action requires no deadline.

The factory owner's threat to his workers illustrates the same principle as the statesman's threat to a continent, only on a grander scale.

This is the diplomacy of the club, the same brute force that drives a man to work for a wage that will never feed his family.

Observe how the arch collapses when the keystone demands the supporting pillars hurry to meet its arbitrary schedule.

You quote the law to others while your own courts find you in violation of it - this is the old hypocrisy in a new suit.

Before you tear down the old court's ruling with a new deadline, could you first explain why the court was built in the first place?

When coercion must be so nakedly applied, it is a sure sign that the hegemony of consent has already broken down.