EU’s Juncker travels to U.S. for next round in tariffs battle
26 July, 2018
One of the European Union’s main leaders will sit down with U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday hoping to convince him to hold off from raising tariffs on imported cars and avoid a trans-Atlantic trade war.
The visit to the White House by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker comes on the heels of an especially ill-tempered continental tour by Trump, in which he called the EU — a 28-country bloc including many historic U.S. allies — his “foe.” Trump especially came down hard on Chancellor Angela Merkel and Germany, the EU’s economic powerhouse.
Trump has already imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Europe, and the EU has responded in kind. But even that exchange of measures would pale in comparison with duties on cars — a huge industry that has long been the symbol of postwar wealth on both sides of the Atlantic, and especially in Germany.
Trump badly wants to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with the EU and is accusing the bloc of not playing fair on trade. And when it comes to security, he says the Europeans are refusing to pay their share in NATO and instead live off the massive U.S. defense budget.
As Juncker was flying over, Trump set the tone with a tweet:
“Tariffs are the greatest!” he wrote. “Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on Trade negotiates a fair deal, or it gets hit with Tariffs. It’s as simple as that.”
Germany has become increasingly fed up with such outbursts. Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, told ARD television hours before Trump’s tweet that, “We won’t let ourselves be threatened and just cave in because, if we do that once, I fear that we will have to deal with such behavior very often in the future.”
When Juncker, the doyen of compromise and consensus politics in the EU, walks into Trump’s office, the hope is that the mood will be different.
“This is an occasion to de-dramatize any potential tensions around trade and to engage in an open, constructive dialogue,” said Juncker’s spokesman, Margaritis Schinas.
The stakes are high, as the car industry carries huge heft in terms of trade and jobs in both the EU and the United States
The European car federation says that the United States is the No. 1 destination for EU-built cars, amounting to almost 30 percent of the total EU export value. It accounts for a quarter of U.S. car imports.
If Trump imposes a 25 percent tariff on imports of cars, trucks and auto parts, it “risks dragging us all down to a game of tit for tat retaliations that ultimately leave consumers in the U.S. as well as in Europe worse off,” said Prof. Alexander Mattelaer of the Egmont Institute think tank.
The EU has already told its U.S. counterparts it is preparing a list of countermeasures if the car tariffs are imposed.
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