Switzerland’s Go-It-Alone Approach Tested by Trump Tariff Shock

The two-minute video isn’t subtle. Wielding a medieval halberd, the president of the conservative Swiss People’s Party lays out the choice Switzerland faces: a simpler life that the country’s founders spelled out in a one-page declaration more than 700 years ago or a 2,000 page treaty with the European Union.

It’s a choice between “freedom and serfdom,” Marcel Dettling says before tossing the treaty documents onto a bonfire.

The trouble for Dettling and Switzerland’s other EU naysayers is that the alternative vision of a nimble nation trading freely with the rest of the world isn’t looking so good anymore. ...