European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said in a recent Radio France interview that the current economic and geopolitical situation marks “the beginning of a march towards independence” for Europe. With the increase in U.S. tariffs, she said, the Continent can come together to take greater control of its destiny.

This comes as Europe grapples with macroeconomic challenges — notably, paltry economic growth. The EU could look at U.S. trade policy as a kind of opportunity.

“Make America Great Again may actually be MEGA — Make Europe Great Again,” said Harold James, a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University.

He said Europe has its share of problems: an aging population, inflation and a relatively low level of investment in innovative businesses. 

“It’s not that Europe doesn’t produce good ideas,” said James. “But on the other hand, they haven’t really translated that into mass marketing of these products.”

But now, he said, Europe is putting more money into areas like defense spending. 

“This is not going to be traditional expenditure on boots and leather belts and … trench-digging equipment,” he said. “The war of the future is about drones and about electronic warfare.”

James said there’s hope that some producers in sectors that will likely be hurt by U.S. tariffs, like automakers, could convert to high-tech defense manufacturing. 

“They have a lot of skills and a lot of historical legacies that they can use in terms of responding to a new defense buildup,” he said.

But before the EU starts printing baseball caps emblazoned with “MEGA,” warns Ángel Talavera at Oxford Economics, building this kind of high-tech ecosystem would be really hard. 

“You hear this very, very often in many countries, like, we’re going to turn this area into the Silicon Valley of Country X, but it doesn’t happen very often, and it doesn’t happen because it’s very difficult,” he said.

Talavera said there are lots of things the European Union could do that would make it easier for companies to grow across boundaries, like make the banking system less fragmented. 

“You have a bank operating in Spain and the same bank operating in Portugal, which is next door, really, and they have to be operating under two different licenses. You cannot have a bank account that is the same one in both countries, things like that,” he said.

But getting political buy-in for large-scale changes to industries like banking would be tough, said Shannon O’Neil, senior vice president and director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Politics is never easy, and it’s never easy when you’re bringing together more than two dozen countries with all of their politics,” she said.

It might not be so much a march toward independence, she said, and more of a walk. Maybe a crawl.