The EU has announced it will impose trade “countermeasures” on up to €26bn (£22bn) 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 at 4am GMT on Wednesday.
“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 Brussels 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. The list was worth €6.3bn in 2018 but has shrunk because of Brexit and declining US exports.
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, who said the bloc was targeting soya beans, which are grown in Louisiana, the state of the US speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. “We love soybeans, but we’re happy to buy them from Brazil or from Argentina or from anywhere else.”
While the commission announced that its measures would total €26bn, EU officials later said they would probably target €22.5bn of US goods, as some products were likely to be filtered out after talks with businesses and member states.
However, 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. The measures “are proportionate”, Haddad told TF1 television. “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.”
While the UK did not announce retaliatory measures, Keir Starmer did not rule them out in future. The prime minister told MPs on Wednesday he was “disappointed” by the tariffs, but would “take a pragmatic approach”.
He said Britain was “negotiating an economic deal which covers and will include tariffs if we succeed. But we will keep all options on the table”.
Starmer, who had previously said that the UK did not need to choose between the EU and the US, had already announced 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 failed.
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.
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Officials also indicated they had not ruled out imposing “safeguard measures” – tariffs or quotas on steel and aluminium from other countries – if US trade barriers resulted in a flood of imports into Europe. In 2019, Switzerland, one of the EU’s closest trading partners, complained when it was affected by EU restrictions on steel imports designed to protect EU industry.
The UK steel industry warned that Trump’s tariffs would have “hugely damaging consequences for UK suppliers and their customers in the US”.
Gareth Stace, the director general of the trade association UK Steel, said: “President Trump must surely recognise that the UK is an ally, not a foe. Our steel sector is not a threat to the US but a partner to key customers, sharing the same values and objectives in addressing global overcapacity and tackling unfair trade.
“These tariffs couldn’t come at a worse time for the UK steel industry, as we battle with high energy costs and subdued demand at home, against an oversupplied and increasingly protectionist global landscape.”
Bernd Lange, the German Social Democratic MEP who chairs the European parliament’s trade committee, described the tariffs as “another dose of self-inflicted tariff pain by the Trump administration”.
He said the latest tariffs were “particularly bad” because “they target US trade partners, they are set arbitrarily, without legal and economic justifications, and they fail to address non-market overcapacity – the main issue steel and aluminium industry across the Atlantic is confronted with”.
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.
