The European Union voted on Wednesday afternoon to approve its first retaliation measures in response to President Trump’s tariffs, moving closer to placing increased duties on a range of manufactured goods and farm products including soybeans and corn.
The new tariffs would take effect in phases starting on April 15, and would affect more than 21 billion euros ($23.5 billion) worth of goods.
The final list responds to Mr. Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs and is a slightly trimmed-down version of one that was announced in mid-March.
The E.U. did not immediately publish an official version of the final tariff list, but one had been circulating among member states before the vote. Tariffs would range from 10 to 25 percent, based on that document, and would apply to a wide range of products including foodstuffs including peanut butter and manufactured goods like hair spray.
E.U. officials have spent recent weeks consulting with policymakers and industries from across the 27-nation bloc in an effort to minimize how much the countermeasures would harm Europeans.
The final list is expected to exclude bourbon, for instance, after Mr. Trump threatened to place a 200 percent tariff on all European alcohol in response to its inclusion. That would have been a crushing blow for wine producers in France, Italy and Spain.
“We are not in a business of going, let’s say, cent for cent, or tit for tat, or dollar for dollar,” Maros Sefcovic, the bloc’s trade commissioner, said this week.
Nearly all E.U. nations voted for the final plan, with only Hungary casting a “no” vote.
Since last month, the United States introduced tariffs of 25 percent on European steel, aluminum and cars. Last week, it imposed a broad 20 percent tariff on everything else coming from Europe, a tax that took effect on Wednesday. European Union officials have said they would prefer to negotiate to get rid of those higher levies, and have even offered to cut tariffs to zero on cars and other industrial products if the United States does the same.
But with serious negotiations slow to materialize, Europe is striking back in a staggered way. The retaliatory tariffs voted on today mark a first step, and come in response only to steel and aluminum levies.
E.U. officials are expected to announce the next step, a plan to hit back at both the car levies and the 20 percent tariffs, as soon as early next week. Much as officials did with the steel and aluminum retaliation, they plan to lay out the suggested contours of the response, then consult with member states, which will then vote on whether to go ahead.
The officials have insisted that all options are on the table, which means that further measures could follow.
For instance, some national officials have suggested that Europe should use a new trade weapon that is often referred to as the European Union’ s “bazooka” to hit American service companies, including big tech firms like Google.
Those measures have not been tried before, but they would potentially give Brussels a more powerful negotiating position: Europe buys more services from America than it sells. Europeans are critical to technology giants’ bottom lines.
Yet whether such an aggressive services retaliation will happen is still unclear. It would be difficult to design in a way that would not cost Europeans — who have come to rely on services like Google search and American cloud technology — and different European capitals have different appetites for retaliation.
“Our main line from the European Commission side has been all the time that we want to negotiate,” Henna Virkkunen, an E.U. commissioner who oversees tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said during a news conference on Wednesday when asked whether hitting back at American technology services would be the right approach.
“But of course, then, when needed, we have to also protect our industry,” she said. “And we are currently also preparing those measures.”
For now, the goal is to slowly and deliberately roll out a response, hoping that Europe’s huge consumer market and significant economic might will be enough to prod Washington closer to working out a solution.
“Europe is always ready for a good deal,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the E.U.’s executive branch, said this week. “But we are also prepared to respond through countermeasures and defend our interests.”
Source link
