Pretty much all of the responses here are irrelevant. (Perhaps accurate, but unrelated to this story.) As per the top comment on this article, what's happening

Pretty much all of the responses here are irrelevant. (Perhaps accurate, but unrelated to this story.) As per the top comment on this article, what's happening is that The Economist hit a slow news day and wrote up a non-story in a misleading way. For years now, the US hasn't honored visa-free travel for five eastern European countries. That technically violates the visa-free reciprocity agreement, so the EP occasionally makes some noise about enforcing those rules. The EC doesn't want to, nor do actual European member states (even the ones not getting reciprocity!) because it would hugely deter tourism, something places like Greece really can't afford. So: the EC is rattling a saber to press the US to hurry up on a narrow bureaucratic issue. The US will probably continue to ignore them, and the EC will probably not do anything about it. A bunch of news orgs looking for clicks slapped dramatic headlines on that and spun it as closely related to current events, making all of us a little more ignorant.