It was another tough week for Europeans after Donald Trump made Labor Day memorable by announcing an additional 25% tariff on EU cars and trucks.
For Brussels, that meant heightened trilogue talks on Wednesday over the fractious EU-U.S. trade, which its scrambling to get across the finish line. Yet even under that kind of pressure, positions remained too far apart for negotiators to bridge the gap.
The fault lines are clear: both the European Commission and most European capitals are pushing for the so-called Turnberry deal to be adopted as soon as possible in its original form, so as not to irritate an already incendiary Trump. The European Parliament, meanwhile, insists on bulletproofing it with a string of safeguard measures that, it argues, Trump’s latest threats have only made more necessary.
“We made good progress ... but there is still some way to go,” Bernd Lange, the Parliament’s international trade committee chair who I profiled this week, wrote in a statement after the trilogue.
As always, the landing zone will be somewhere in the middle. One European diplomat told me that, while a “sunrise clause” seems by now unlikely to make it into the final text, there will be “reinforced” provisions to allow the EU to walk away if Washington fails to keep its word. Such a clause would have tied the deal’s final ratification to the U.S. lowering tariffs on EU steel and aluminum to 15%.
The EU executive, meanwhile, is continuing to bulldoze ahead with its famously conciliatory approach, insisting that “further stabilizing EU-US trade, by reinforcing predictability for EU businesses … and safeguarding jobs that depend on transatlantic trade … is in everyone's interest,” as EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič put it on LinkedIn on Thursday.
But experts are unconvinced. David Kleimann, a trade analyst with the German Institute of Development and Sustainability, called Trump’s latest threat a “bluff.” Trump had initially warned he would impose punishing tariffs as early as this week, before later floating a July 4 deadline, symbolically coinciding with U.S. Independence Day.
As if that weren’t enough, a fresh ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court further eroded Trump’s ability to wage trade wars, finding that he had acted against the law when imposing a universal 10% tariff on most U.S. imports earlier this year.
Had these been normal times, the ruling would almost certainly have triggered a rethink of the deal itself. But as talks are unfolding against a backdrop of coercion, chances are the deal could still be adopted as early as May 19, when negotiators are poised to meet again.
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The Parliament's May print edition is out now. This month's cover story explores what a post-Orbán Hungary means for Europe's hard right.
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