President Trump announced in letters posted to social media on Saturday that he would place a 30 percent tariff on goods from the European Union and Mexico, upending months of careful negotiations and roiling America’s economic relationships with two of its biggest trading partners.
Mr. Trump’s tariffs would take effect on Aug. 1, like those on many other trading partners.
The United States and the European Union, a trading bloc of 27 nations that collectively make up the world’s third-largest economy, do a huge amount of trade in goods and services. Given their close ties, European officials had been hoping they could manage to strike a deal with their American counterparts to avoid such steep levies.
Maros Sefcovic, the European Union’s trade commissioner, has been in regular contact with the U.S. commerce secretary and trade representative. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, has spoken to Mr. Trump. And until very recently, officials had hoped they were on the cusp of a deal.
E.U. policymakers had gradually come around to the possibility that the bloc could face 10 percent across-the-board tariffs on all goods sent to the United States, and were hoping to negotiate exceptions for important products. Many of the policymakers were eager to end the economic uncertainty that Mr. Trump’s trade announcements had unleashed on German carmakers, Italian wine exporters and Irish pharmaceutical companies alike.
But things changed with Mr. Trump’s announcement on Saturday of a flat 30 percent tariff, and his threat to make that rate even higher should the bloc retaliate.
“If for any reason you decide to raise your tariffs and retaliate, then, whatever the number you choose to raise them by, will be added onto the 30 percent that we charge,” Mr. Trump wrote in the letter, which echoed a form letter he has been sending out to many American trading partners announcing their tariff rate
For the European Union, the question now is whether the bloc will hit back.
Press officers for the European Commission, the E.U. executive branch, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The bloc had already prepared a retaliatory package in response to earlier tariffs, but had paused them to create leeway for negotiation. That retaliation would apply to some 21 billion euros (nearly $25 billion) worth of imports from the United States. The tariffs are scheduled to kick in at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday unless E.U. officials choose to suspend them.
“Of course, there are possibilities to react, but we don’t want to,” Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, said in an interview on Friday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, speaking before Mr. Trump’s announcement. “We don’t want to retaliate. We don’t want this trade war.”
In the run-up to Mr. Trump’s announcement, officials from the European Union had reiterated that their goal was to reach an agreement in principle, a sort of rough-draft trade plan that could serve as a basis for more detailed negotiations.
“We are working nonstop to find an initial agreement with the U.S.,” Ms. von der Leyen said earlier this week. “But we are also not naïve; we know the relationship with the U.S. may not return to what it once was.”
If Mr. Trump is serious about such steep tariffs, it could have serious consequences for the relationship between the European Union and the United States, which are historically intertwined and deeply integrated economically.
If the tariffs rates remain, “that means trade war,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the economic think tank Bruegel in Brussels.
He did not think that Mr. Trump’s warning against retaliation would have much effect on the E.U.’s appetite to hit back. He said the best Europe can hope for is a situation in which many of America’s global trading partners retaliate, perhaps in a coordinated way, and Mr. Trump is pressured to strike a less extreme stance.
“They have consistently said they would defend themselves under the right circumstances,” he said. “Now those circumstances are here.”
Zunaira Saieed contributed reporting.
Jeanna Smialek is the Brussels bureau chief for The Times.
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