Trump's Trade War: What Answers for the European Union?
The announcement, on April 2, 2025, of “reciprocal tariffs” by the United States has opened a sequence of profound break with decades of established trade policy practices, where the administration behaviour has been marked by dogmatic blindness, amateurism, and self-serving interests.
Finding a coherent strategy behind the rapid succession of measures, suspensions, and purported agreements is challenging, and the successive policy reversals are best explained by the administration’s own inconsistencies. The damage is nonetheless real for partners. For the European Union, it calls for firm but measured responses, without seeking symmetrical retaliation. While division is a threat, the inherent slowness of European procedures could be an asset in this context, as the United States will be confronted with its own contradictions. Broad retaliatory measures should be considered, beyond trade in goods, and the hypothesis of a first activation of the anti-coercion instrument should not be ruled out at this stage, on the contrary.
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Sébastien JEAN
Associate Director of Ifri's Geoeconomics and Geofinance initiative
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