Here’s a TTIP for you. No, that’s not a typo missed by our ever-vigilant editors. It stands for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, what British prime minister David Cameron calls a “once-in-a-generation prize” that can create two million jobs on both sides of the Atlantic, and Sir Peter Westmacott, Britain’s ambassador here in Washington, reportedly describes as the “Holy Grail” for resuscitating transatlantic economies. If the deal can be fashioned, TTIP will have created what analysts at the Brunswick Group describe as “the largest internal market in the world, with 830 million consumers, and would liberalize one-third of global trade.”

Some 150 negotiators from the EU and the U.S. sat down in Washington last Monday to begin negotiating a trade-liberalizing agreement between two parties that between them account for almost half of the world’s economic output. It wasn’t easy getting to the table. The French, whose antipathy to free markets extends to free trade, first refused to attend unless their subsidies to domestic filmmakers and quotas against American cultural products were declared off the table. Even their European negotiating partners laughed off France’s effort to refuse to allow discussion of a measure designed to protect producers of films no one wants to see, a move that would have antagonized Hollywood moguls, among them Barack Obama’s more important fundraisers.