The European Union has a perfect symbol for its governing philosophy: air conditioning for the elites, lectures and arbitrary restrictions for everyone else.
During a brutal heat wave in Brussels, the European Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters reportedly shut down cooling on floors one through seven. The upper floors, where senior officials and commissioners work, kept their air conditioning. One staffer called it “feudalism.” Another called it a “disgrace.” They were both right.
This is the EU in one story. The chosen elites stay cool, while everyone else sweats. Then those same elites write rules telling everyone else how to live.
Brussels constantly presents itself as the global standard for enlightened governance. It lectures the world on climate, net zero, electric vehicles, digital regulation, speech, trade, taxation and public health.
The EU claims to be leading the world toward a cleaner, safer future. Yet when actual heat arrives, its institutions are still scrambling with the basics: buildings without reliable cooling, trains without air conditioning, and public systems that cannot handle the weather Brussels has spent decades warning everyone about.
That is the real problem. The EU is obsessed with controlling the future, but it cannot manage the present.
Brussels’ impulse to control does not stop with climate policy. It has now migrated directly into health policy.
Air conditioning is health policy. Heat is dangerous, cooling saves lives, and yet the collectivist answer is always the same: use less, accept less, sacrifice more and blindly trust the AC elite.
That is why Europe’s bureaucrats have found their ideal American ally in Zohran Mamdani, who urged New Yorkers during a heat wave to set their air conditioners to 78 degrees. It is the same worldview Brussels lives by: everyone is supposedly better off “together,” as long as someone else decides what that means.
Europe is already taking that logic further. In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz is moving to tighten sick-leave rules by requiring workers to provide a doctor’s note from the first day they are ill. Even being sick is becoming another compliance exercise.
Now they are applying that same logic to personal health decisions, from higher tobacco taxes to vaping restrictions and new limits on lower-risk nicotine alternatives.
Zyn is the clearest example.
In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently said adult smokers who switch completely from cigarettes to Zyn face lower risks of mouth cancer, heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, emphysema and chronic bronchitis.
But in Europe, nicotine pouches are being pushed into the same bureaucratic meat grinder that Brussels applies to everything else of which the cocktail crowd disapproves. The Commission has moved to bring nicotine pouches under the Tobacco Taxation Directive, while countries such as France have pursued bans or heavy restrictions that carry prison time.
While Washington is recognizing that adults deserve accurate information about lower-risk alternatives, Brussels is looking for ways to restrict, tax or ban them.
Meanwhile, Europe is failing to control illegal disposable vapes, banned flavors, excessive nicotine levels and unauthorized devices moving through black-market channels. Regulated products are demonized, while illegal and unregulated products keep reaching consumers, including young people.
No air conditioning, and now no Zyn either.
This is not really about nicotine. It is about whether unelected European regulators get to decide that adults cannot be trusted with choices and simple freedoms Americans take for granted. There’s nowhere bureaucrats won’t go, and no freedom they won’t stamp out.
It is the same instinct behind the EU’s speech rules and digital taxes, which place major obligations on large online platforms and technology companies, many of them American.
Brussels taxes, regulates, and lectures Americans, then expects American power to keep global trade routes open when crises hit. European governments call for diplomacy when it is convenient but are nowhere to be found when real action is required.
That is why President Donald Trump should pay attention. Zyn is a Made-in-America success story, with production tied to American jobs. If Brussels can target that product despite the FDA’s scientific review, it will not stop there.
Brussels needs to stop overregulating and overheating its own people and focus on fixing its own problems instead.
