The European Union has announced it will impose trade “counter-measures” on up to €26 billion($28.3 billion) worth of US goods in retaliation to Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, escalating a global trade war.
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, called the 25% US levies on global imports of the metals “unjustified trade restrictions”, after they came into force on Wednesday, the Guardian newspaper reported from Brussels.
“We deeply regret this measure,” von der Leyen said in a statement, where she announced “strong, but proportionate” countermeasures would come into force from 1 April. “Tariffs are taxes, they are bad for business and worse for consumers. They are disrupting supply chains. They bring uncertainty for the economy,” she said.
The retaliatory measures include the EU reimposing tariffs on US goods including bourbon whiskey, jeans and Harley-Davidson motorbikes, which it introduced during the first Trump term and later suspended after talks with his successor, Joe Biden.
These tariffs, which target notable US goods worth €4.5bn, often from Republican states, will snap back on 1 April.
Separately, the commission plans further retaliation targeting goods worth €18bn, including a wide range of steel and aluminium products, as well as agricultural produce, such as poultry, beef, seafood and nuts. These tariffs would be imposed from mid-April, after a vote by EU member states and consultations with industry in an attempt to minimise damage to the European economy. “We try to hit … where it hurts,” said a senior EU official.
Further steps have not been ruled out. France’s European affairs minister, Benjamin Haddad, said on Wednesday that the EU could “go further” in its response to the US tariffs. “If it came to a situation where we had to go further, digital services or intellectual property could be included,” he said.
EU officials hope that pressure on Republican states and US business will help bring about a deal.“We will always remain open to negotiation,” von der Leyen said. “We firmly believe that in a world fraught with geopolitical and economic uncertainties, it is not in our common interest to burden our economies with tariffs.”
EU officials said they were talking to counterparts in other countries, including the UK, Switzerland, Norway, Canada and Japan, but there had not been any coordination over responses.
Britain will not issue its own immediate measures in response to the US tariffs but the government said it would “reserve our right to retaliate”.
Asked by Sky News whether Britain’s response to the levies could be called weak in comparison with the EU, Murray said the UK was in a “very different position than the EU” and did not want to be “pushed off course” as it pursued a trade deal with Washington.
The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, who has previously said the UK does not need to choose between the EU and the US, said on Tuesday that Britain would not respond with its own counter-tariffs after last-ditch efforts to persuade Trump to spare British industry from his global tariffs appeared to have failed.
The introduction of EU measures came after a day of drama on Tuesday, when Trump threatened to double tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminium in response to Canadian threats to increase electricity prices for US customers.
The US president backed off from those plans after the Ontario premier, Doug Ford, agreed to suspend his province’s decision to impose a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to the states of Minnesota, Michigan and New York.
