Given that the European Union is constantly hectoring America about our supposed violations of the World Trade Organization — steel tariffs, secondary sanctions on Iran and Libya, and the like — it’s going to be interesting to see how the bureaucrats in Brussels defend their latest assault on free trade. We speak of the E.U.’s decision, taken yesterday, to outlaw the advertising of tobacco products in newspapers and magazines. In America, this would be a blatant violation of the First Amendment freedoms of the press and of speech. In Europe, it counts as a public health measure. The claim that this would apply only to European publications is a bit of a stretch. What of newspapers like the International Herald Tribune and the Wall Street Journal, or the international editions of Newsweek and Time, which are American-owned but circulate globally? Or of the Financial Times and the Economist, which are European-owned but circulate in America? Some of these may already decline certain categories of advertising, but doing that voluntarily is a far cry from doing so at the behest of government regulators. We don’t mind saying that our own view is that so long as tobacco is a legal product, it should be legal to advertise it. The key point with respect to the European Union, though, is that in this case, the Brussels bureaucrats are throwing up obstacles to the free trade they are constantly lecturing America on the virtue of.