The EU in just the past year has signed deals with Latin America and India in addition to the already existing ones with South Korea, Canada, Japan etc.
It has positioned itself at the center of the world's largest free trade zone.
It's managed to replace US contributions to Ukraine and looks like its in the process of bloodying Russia's nose.
Reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated.
The EU has expanded to incorporate many more countries but is a much smaller fraction of the world's economy than it was in the 70s. Europe is the world's slowest growing region so this will continue.
Free trade didn't stop Russia from invading Ukraine and it didn't convert China into a democracy. And the india's deal is saddling us with more third world immigration that will only make things worse.
It seems to me that this is still all the EU not keeping up with where the world is going. We started drafting the mercosur agreement 27 years ago so we finalize it and call it a victory, all that it's probably going to do is precipitate the demise of our domestic agribusiness, so that farmers won't be able to cause a ruckus in Brussels anymore.