The European Union-United States trade deal, announced to fanfare this summer, is already showing signs of unravelling. The most surprising aspect may be that this is hardly a surprise.
The EU signed the “Framework on an Agreement on Reciprocal, Fair, and Balanced Trade” in late July in the hopes it would substantially assuage fears among European businesses about an all-out trade war with the United States. But this month, U.S. President Donald Trump seemed to revoke that understanding as he threatened to impose more tariffs on Europe if Brussels doesn’t loosen its rules and regulations that police online disinformation, election interference, and hate speech.
“We cannot let this happen to brilliant and unprecedented American Ingenuity,” he wrote on Truth Social after the EU fined Google nearly 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) for violating anti-monopoly laws. EU spokespeople played down the turbulence—but they may be trying to wish away a major problem.
An even bigger challenge confronting the deal is Trump’s expectation of billions of dollars’ worth of energy purchases from Europe. The EU has said it “intends to procure US liquified natural gas, oil, and nuclear energy products with an expected offtake valued at $750 billion,” during Trump’s remaining term in office. But the White House seems to see it as a commitment—a done deal.
This mismatch in intentions and expectations could derail the deal.
Emre Peker, the director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, told CNBC that the key to keeping “the EU-US trade deal on track will be demonstrating rising EU energy purchases and investments in the US.”
This week, as U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright visits Europe to meet with the EU’s energy commissioner and demand that the block expedite energy purchases, experts issued a slew of warnings.
“Wright’s calls to increase purchases of U.S. LNG [liquefied natural gas] and fossil fuel products are an intimidation tactic that distracts from genuine climate action and the urgent transition to clean energy solutions,” said Enrico Donda, a gas campaigner at advocacy organization Food and Water Watch.
And while there is palpable anxiety among environment activists that the EU may dilute its decarbonization goals and build more LNG infrastructure that will impede its path to net zero, several energy experts told Foreign Policy, it simply isn’t wise for the EU to increase gas purchases when demand in gas is expected to decline.
“There is way too much U.S. LNG capacity coming online for Europe to absorb,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a former head of gas analysis at BP who now works as a global research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy. “There is also a nontrivial possibility that the U.S. will export more LNG than Europe will consume,” probably by the early 2030s, she added.
Experts are baffled at the European Union’s expressed intentions since the numbers just don’t add up.
“I have been looking at the numbers over and over again, I still don’t understand how the EU can buy energy worth $750 billion.” Corbeau told Foreign Policy.
Last year, the EU spent 375 billion euros ($440 billion) on energy imports, and even though the United States has turned into the largest LNG exporter to the EU—supplying 45 percent of the bloc’s total imported needs in 2024—it still paid the United States a total bill of just around 76 billion euros ($89 billion). In order to purchase energy worth $250 billion yearly from the United States, the EU would have to triple its purchases and abandon existing providers—such as Norway—that offer better rates.
There are other complications, too. Tatiana Mitrova, a research fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy, said the EU cannot force European companies to make such purchases. And the United States doesn’t currently have the capacity to sell as much petroleum or LNG as would be required to meet the pace.
“The U.S. would have to export 4.5 to 5.5 million barrels [of crude oil and petroleum products to Europe] per day; right now, it is sending [Europe] 1.6 to 2.2 million [barrels] a day,” Mitrova said. “In LNG—it should come up to 200 [billion]-300 billion cubic meters annually; right now, shipments to Europe are around 58 to 70 billion cubic meters.”
In order to export such large volumes, Mitrova said, the United States would have to extensively increase its oil and gas production in a very short period of time, which seems unrealistic.
“Some capacity additions are ongoing—new LNG plants, etc. But most of these volumes are already contracted,” Mitrova said. Moreover, she added, LNG is a globally traded commodity, so “if Japan offers better prices, the U.S. companies will prefer to sell there instead to the EU.”
Furthermore, many experts have dismissed the EU’s claim that it is essentially trying to look for alternatives to Russian gas. Last year, the EU imported fossil fuel worth roughly 22 billion euros ($25.8 billion) from Russia—and that number is tiny compared to the $250 billion a year that the United States is expecting.
And it makes little sense to depend on Trump for such a strategic commodity. “We are already importing more than half of [the continent’s] LNG from the U.S.,” Corbeau added. “There is a risk in depending on one source for natural gas, similar to the dependency we had on Russia.”
Corbeau said that the only way the EU could buy such large amounts of energy from the United States is through a platform called Aggregate EU, which incentivizes European buyers to buy LNG from the United States over a long period of time. “But it won’t be delivered between 2026-2028, but over several years to decades,” Corbeau said.
Julian Popov—a senior fellow with Strategic Perspectives, a climate action think tank, as well as a two-time Bulgarian environment minister—told Foreign Policy that the clause on EU’s energy purchases in the agreement was “very much political in nature,” with little backing in reality.
“Neither Trump is selling such large amounts of oil and gas, nor is Ursula von der Leyen [the European Commission president] buying. This was political,” he said, in order to appease Trump and get a deal on tariffs.
And while the Europeans may have oversold their intentions, Trump is pursuing a confusing policy. While, on one hand, Trump has increased pressure on the Europeans to stop purchasing Russian gas, on the other, he is rehabilitating Russian President Vladimir Putin—which, in the end, could strengthen the argument in Europe in favor of resumption of Russian energy purchases.
Meanwhile, Brussels is facing an internal backlash, as the European socialists—the second-largest coalition in the European Parliament—have opposed the deal.
“We will not rubber-stamp concessions that harm our workers, businesses, or European values,” the group said in a statement published on Sept. 3. “We need real safeguard measures to protect our industries, a binding review clause to shield Europe from Trump’s unpredictability.”
Bernd Lange, the European Parliament’s trade chief, dubbed the clause on energy purchases as “totally unrealistic.”
And the European people are the most displeased.
According to a recent poll, conducted by Cluster17 in five European countries, including France, Germany, and Spain, respondents said they felt “humiliated” by the EU-U.S. trade deal. Nearly 70 percent said they were willing to boycott U.S. goods for as long as Trump is in power, and 44 percent and 47 percent, respectively, said they see him as “an enemy of Europe” with “autocratic tendencies.”
That might spell doom for Trump’s key motive—to sell more than buy from Europe. But for now, European policy is reactive—hoping to manage Trump while trade delegations rush around the globe and look for deals.
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