The European Union on Wednesday approved its first retaliation measures in response to President Trump’s tariffs, a plan that was thrown into uncertainty just hours later, when Mr. Trump announced he would be ramping up tariffs on China while pausing some of his levies on other countries.
E.U. officials did not respond with an immediate comment on how they might react to Mr. Trump’s latest swerve.
Depending on how events develop, Mr. Trump’s announcement could be seen as a vindication of the European strategy: Rather than taking the aggressive tack that China has used to respond to the president’s tariffs, E.U. policymakers have moved slowly — making extensive outreach to their American counterparts, emphasizing that they want to negotiate, offering up possible wins, and announcing plans to hit back only slowly and as a last resort.
“They’re not really going for full confrontation,” said Carsten Brzeski, an economist at ING, said of the bloc’s approach before Mr. Trump’s announcement on Wednesday.
Europe’s plans for retaliation were always gradual. The response approved on Wednesday, by a group of E.U. trade policymakers, would place increased duties on a range of U.S. manufactured goods and farm products, including soybeans and corn.
The new tariffs would take effect in phases starting on April 15, and would affect about 21 billion euros ($23 billion) worth of goods. But it was unclear what would happen to those plans after Mr. Trump’s abrupt shift on Wednesday.
The Europeans’ final list responded to Mr. Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs and was a slightly trimmed-down version of one that was first announced in mid-March.
In his announcement, posted on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said he had authorized a 90-day pause and a lower across-the-board tariff during that period for countries other than China, in part because they had not retaliated to his earlier tariff announcements.
If the postponement applies to the European Union, that means the United States would impose a 10 percent across-the-board tariff for now, rather than the 20 percent on all E.U. goods that Mr. Trump announced last week.
But the E.U. has yet to respond to the across-the-board tariffs. Its announcement of tariffs on Wednesday were a response specifically to Mr. Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, imposed last month. The E.U. was still drawing up plans for further retaliation, both to Mr. Trump’s announced 25 percent tariff on European cars and his 20 percent broad-based tariff.
European leaders had always been clear that the goal of the retaliation was to prod Americans toward negotiations, and that tariffs and retaliatory levies would inflict pain on both sides of the Atlantic.
They had spent recent weeks consulting with policymakers and industries from across the 27-nation bloc on the list of items they would hit with tariffs. The E.U. did not immediately publish an official version of the list approved on Wednesday. But one that had been circulating among member states before the vote showed tariffs ranging from 10 to 25 percent, on a wide range of products including foodstuffs like peanut butter and manufactured goods like hair spray.
The final list was expected to exclude bourbon after Mr. Trump threatened to place a 200 percent tariff on all European alcohol in response to its inclusion. That would have been a crushing blow for wine producers in France, Italy and Spain.
“Any actions that they take may have costs for the European economy as well,” said Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Nearly all E.U. nations voted for the final plan, with only Hungary’s representative casting a “no” vote.
Before voting on the retaliation plan, European Union officials had attempted to lure their U.S. counterparts to the table to make a deal, and had even offered to cut tariffs to zero on cars and other industrial products if the United States did the same.
But before Wednesday, serious negotiations had been slow to materialize.
“We are in the early stages of discussions because the U.S. views tariffs not as a tactical step but as a corrective measure,” Maros Sefcovic, the E.U. trade commissioner, said this week.
Given that, Europe had decided to strike back in a staggered way, hoping to allow American officials time to begin talks.
The new retaliatory tariffs were meant to mark a first step, and to phase in slowly: Some duties will be collected starting on April 15, others on May 15, and a small share will not kick in until Dec. 1, according to an E.U. official.
E.U. officials had been expected to announce the next step, a plan to hit back at both the car levies and the 20 percent tariffs, as soon as early next week. Officials planned to lay out the suggested contours of the response, then consult with member states, and then to later vote on whether to go ahead.
As they pushed ahead with their methodical retaliation, European policymakers also insisted that all options were on the table, which meant that further measures could follow.
For instance, some national officials have suggested that Europe should use a new trade weapon that is often referred to as the European Union’ s “bazooka” to hit American service companies, including big tech firms like Google.
Those measures have not been tried before, but they would potentially give Brussels a more powerful negotiating position: Europe buys more services from America than it sells. European customers are critical to technology giants’ bottom lines.
Yet whether such an aggressive counterpunch might actually happen is still unclear. It would be difficult to design in a way that would not cost Europeans — who have come to rely on services like Google search and American cloud technology — and different European capitals have different appetites for retaliation.
“We want to negotiate,” Henna Virkkunen, an E.U. commissioner who oversees tech sovereignty, said during a news conference on Wednesday when asked whether hitting back at American technology services would be the right approach.
“But of course, then, when needed, we have to also protect our industry,” she said. “And we are currently also preparing those measures.”
Jeanna Smialek is the Brussels bureau chief for The Times.
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