The European Union plans to vote for its first retaliation measures in response to President Trump's rates, closer to placing increased tasks on a series of goods and agricultural products that would come into effect next week.
The list for consideration is a somewhat trimmed version of a version announced in mid-March in response to Mr Trump's steel and aluminum rates. In recent weeks, EU officials have spent with policy makers and industries from the 27-country block in an attempt to minimize how much the countermeasures would harm Europeans.
The final list is expected to exclude Bourbon, for example after Mr Trump threatened to place a 200 percent rate on all European alcohol in response to the inclusion. That would have been a crushing blow for wine producers in France, Italy and Spain.
“We are not to deal with a company, say, cent by cent or tit for tat, or dollar for dollars,” said Maros Sefcovic, the trade commissioner of the block this week.
Since last month, the United States has introduced the rates of 25 percent on steel, aluminum and cars, and 20 percent on everything else that comes from Europe and that wide rates are in force on Wednesday. European Union officials said they would rather negotiate to get rid of those higher levies, and even offered to reduce rates for zero on cars and other industrial products as the United States do the same.
But with serious negotiations that are slowly arriving, Europe is coming back in a spread way. The retribution rates for a vote on Wednesday would be a first step, in response only to steel and aluminum taxes.
The EU officials are expected to announce the next step, a plan to hit back at both the car taxes and the 20 percent rates, early next week. As with the steel and aluminum retribution, they intend to draw up the proposed contours of the reaction and then consult the Member States, which will then vote on whether or not to go.
The officials have urged that all options are on the table, which means that further measures can follow.
For example, some national officials have suggested that Europe should use a new trade weapon that is often mentioned as the “Bazooka” of the European Union to touch American service companies, including large technology companies such as Google.
Those measures have never been tried before, but they might give Brussels a more powerful negotiating position: Europe is buying more services from America than it sells. Europeans are crucial for the bottom lines of technology giants.
But it is still unclear whether such an aggressive service delay will actually happen. It would be difficult to design in a way that would not cost Europeans – who have started to rely on services such as Google Search and American Cloud Technology – and various European capitals have different appetite for retribution.
For now, the goal is to roll out a reaction slowly and deliberately, in the hope that the huge consumer market in Europe and a considerable economic may be sufficient to promote Washington closer to developing a solution.
“Europe is always ready for a good deal,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU Executive Branch, this week. “But we are also willing to respond by defending countermeasures and our interests.”
