Because in the « war » of the duties Europe does not play all its cards (and now it is almost without means of retaliation)

After the Liberation Day of April 2, with the announcement of the « mutual » duties between 20% and 25% on an export of 605 billion dollars, European ministers asked themselves a question: Was it time to take the bazooka? The bazooka It is a new vehicle for the European Union, built a year and a half ago under the name of « anti-coercion tool ». This is a quick procedure that allows Brussels to impose sanctions – including duties – on countries trying to exercise commercial, financial or commercial blackmail on Europe. It is activated if the EU Commission decides that the risk of coercion exists, essentially The bazooka is loaded for the purpose of dissuasion; So the device takes if and when needed.

In the end, in the first week of April the ministers of trade Of the 27 they took a different way: the European Union would have imposed duties at 25% on imports from the United States for 21 billion euros (24 billion dollars), 6.5% of sales of American agricultural or industrial products in Europe. Not only the « anti-coercion » tool was not triggered, but The procedures were not even started to have it ready in case of need.

The bazooka remained to take the dust. It remains there even now that Donald Trump has impressed yet another turn, threatening 50% duties on the whole European exports in seven days. Brussels has the option of 25% in the right hand on niche products such as soybeans, paints and polyethylene, enlargeable in theory to cover no more than a quarter of the total sales of American goods in Europe (but nothing of the services). When the White House declares itself ready to stop the truce and reopen the commercial war, The union is now almost without means of retaliation.

Brussels and the other capitals had believed a lot to that truceopen on April 10 when the market reaction had pushed Trump to reduce the duties to 10% for three months. They thought they had time and in the meantime they had frozen any countermeasure. The EU Commission recently had also probed the Tokyo and Seoul negotiators on the hypothesis of an extension of the « suspension » of Trump: it was thought that the 10% American duties (more than quadrupled compared to January) could have remained all summer, while Brussels and Washington discussed calmly.

The reason why the bazooka has never been activated goes to the heart of the European Union’s housing. To make them effective, those measures should have hit the Americans where it hurts: digital and financial services such as credit cards. But Europe does not produce any of this. Records a deficit in exchanges with the United States of over 130 billion euros only on « intellectual property rights », the money spent for a subscription to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Chat-GPT or for Facebook services. The Bazooka blows would have twisted against European citizens in the form of increases on their digital life, because those technologies are irreplaceable by « made in the EU ». The same applies, in part, for financial services.

The misunderstandings of the negotiation did the rest. Brussels pointed to « zero-for-zero » duties-freezing bilateral exchange-offering to buy more weapons and gas from America. Washington, on the other hand, wants to keep the duties at 10%, but asks for European commitments to raise barriers on China, eliminate web tax and antitrust rules on the digital giants of Silicon Valley, as well as eliminating VAT for US products. It was a dialogue between deaf and the rest, the commission does not have a mandate of governments to make concessions on the tax aspects in their hands. In Brussels, other « investigations » were rightly started – after that on the car – to understand if Beijing certain industrial products and therefore deserves other duties. Nothing more.

So Europe continued to operate how he lived in the world of yesterday; Trump continued with his chaos strategy. Mark Carney, the Canadian premier, promised to « fight » in this commercial war and said that the old relationship with America, based on growing integration, « is over ». Europe prefers not to think about it.