The EU is preparing retaliatory measures against some leading US brands after US President Donald Trump threatened a global trade war play placing huge tariffs on steel and aluminium, European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said Friday.
“We will not sit idly when European industry and jobs are threatened. #EU preparing import duties for US products including Harley-Davidson, Bourbon and Levi’s jeans,” his spokeswoman quoted him on Twitter as telling journalists in Germany.
Meanwhile, European Commission Vice-President Jyrki Katainen has urged Trump to back off from signing the tariffs, saying there is still a small window to avoid a trade war, and the International Monetary Fund has warned of grave consequences.
The remarks came the same day that Trump boasted that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.”
None of this is reasonable … I can’t see how this isn’t part of [trade] war-like behaviour
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker
Earlier on Friday, Juncker commented: “None of this is reasonable, but reason is a sentiment that’s very unevenly distributed in the world.”
Asked if a trade war is brewing, he said: “I can’t see how this isn’t part of war-like behaviour.”
Katainen, meanwhile, said that the EU would “form a coalition of like-minded countries and potentially take the US to the WTO court together,” Katainen said in reference to the World Trade Organization tribunal in Geneva.
However, the former Finnish prime minister said, “there is a little window of opportunity still open” and that “the president of the US has not yet signed the proposals. So we do hope that he will reconsider his aims.”
“We are very close to a fast spreading trade war and in this kind of war there are only victims, not winners, said Katainen, who handles trade policy for the EU with trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom.
Trade war signalled by Trump has to be stopped at all costs
He said he understood that the US was seeking to take a stand against China, which has flooded the globe with cheap steel.
“I understand the frustration but the medicine the US administration is willing to use is not right,” he said.
Global trade war... means in concrete terms unemployment, less economic growth, and worse relations
European Commission Vice-President Jyrki Katainen
He added that a “global trade war... means in concrete terms unemployment, less economic growth, and worse relations between trading partners.
“At a time when we have just come out of the most severe economic crisis in decades, nobody should do anything in order to harm the stability we have achieved.”
Also opposing Trump’s of 25 per cent tariff on imported steel and 10 per cent tariff on imported aluminium was the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which warned that they will harm the US and global economies.
“The import restrictions announced by the US President are likely to cause damage not only outside the US, but also to the US economy itself,” IMF spokesman Gerry Rice said in a statement.
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