Brussels suspended its countermeasures against the U.S. president’s steel and aluminum tariffs before they even took effect. Now the two sides have 90 days to do a deal.
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EU to Trump on tariffs: We’ll retaliate when we’re ready, not when you tweet
Brussels suspended its countermeasures against the U.S. president’s steel and aluminum tariffs before they even took effect. Now the two sides have 90 days to do a deal.
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European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen suspended EU tariffs on €20.9 billion in U.S. exports before they even took effect. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
April 11, 2025 4:44 am CET
By
Camille Gijs
BRUSSELS — The European Union doesn’t really do knee-jerk reactions. And when it comes to trade wars, it prepares its case, builds a consensus among its members — and saves its most painful retaliation until last.
Donald Trump’s unprecedented tariff onslaught is no exception.
Just after the bloc
locked in its response on Wednesday to Trump’s
month-old steel and aluminum tariffs, the U.S. president announced a 90-day truce on the “reciprocal” tariffs he imposed on “Liberation Day” a week earlier.
Trump had hit the 27-nation bloc with a 20 percent duty on all goods. Under pressure as financial markets melted down, he halved the levy to 10 percent — the baseline he has set in his bid to bring investment and industrial jobs lost to globalization back home.
So it happened that, on Thursday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen
suspended EU tariffs on €20.9 billion in U.S. exports before they even took effect. It was the retaliation that never happened. At least not yet.
“We want to give negotiations a chance,” von der Leyen
said in a social media post.
That was followed by a kicker: “If negotiations are not satisfactory, our countermeasures will kick in. Preparatory work on further countermeasures continues. As I have said before, all options remain on the table.”
By design as much as by strategy, the bloc’s reaction to Trump is moving slowly, anchored in legal justification and carefully weighted through internal consensus — with businesses, but most importantly, with the bloc’s member countries.
That’s because while trade policy may be the Commission’s turf, Brussels still needs political cover.
Under the EU’s arcane rules, trade escalations usually require the support of a “qualified majority” of national capitals — at least 15 of the EU’s 27 member countries. And even in cases where the Commission can legally steamroll national governments, it tends to build coalitions, knowing that the power it wields has been delegated to it by EU governments.
Put another way, if you have to speak to 27 friends before going public, it tends to forestall any emotional outbursts. (Von der Leyen’s announcement followed a meeting of EU envoys in a “secure room” to discuss Trump’s tariff retreat. Unlike the U.S. president, she doesn’t get to rule by executive order or by social media fiat.)
“The imperative of devising negotiation strategies that are anchored in the support of member states forces the Commission to play the long game,” said David Kleimann, a senior trade expert at the ODI think tank.
“The stark preference for well-prepared negotiations is currently working out in the EU’s favor as stock and bond markets have caused more damage to Trump’s tariff plans than any immediate retaliatory response could possibly afford,” he added.
For all the relief over Trump’s 90-day truce, his 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, as well as on cars, remain in force.
The EU insists it can escalate if it has to — and has even designed a scary trade “bazooka,” known as the Anti-Coercion Instrument, to hit back at the kind of economic bullying Trump is practicing. But deploying it would still take at least six months, and two more qualified majorities.
As Ireland’s foreign and trade minister Simon Harris put it at a meeting of EU trade ministers in Luxembourg that paved the way for Wednesday’s countermeasures vote, activating the ACI would represent an extraordinary escalation. “It is in many ways the nuclear option,” he told reporters.
Sigh of relief
So when Trump on Wednesday called for a three-month break in the tit-for-tat trade escalation, his hand forced by the imminent risk of a global financial crisis, Brussels sighed with relief. 'Wait and see' does pay off, the bloc reflected. At least for now.
"Stock markets are doing the work for us,” one EU diplomat said earlier this week, as U.S. equity indexes flirted with bear-market territory and a run on Treasury bonds raised fears that the stability of the global financial system was in jeopardy.
The bloc rejoiced at Trump's tariff suspension and responded within 24 hours with its own 90-day pause on its countermeasures against the steel and aluminum tariffs Trump imposed on March 12, opening a transatlantic front in his global trade war.
The pause, in the EU's thinking, gives some needed breathing space to everyone, including Trump and the markets, to calm down and come to their senses.
As a second EU diplomat put it: “Let's talk, and seriously this time, otherwise we still retaliate.”
Bourbon out, soybeans in
The purpose of the EU’s strategy is to hurt Trump’s Republican cohorts and their MAGA voter base as much as possible — without injuring European interests.
With those aims, patience is a virtue and restraint is power, officials in Brussels stress.
When it crafted its list of tariffs to respond to the U.S. steel and aluminum duties, the Commission designed the response to come in three separate waves of duties from April 15 to Dec. 1, depending on the product.
A 25 percent tariff on soybeans,
the most valuable item on the bloc’s hit list, was to arrive last, giving European farmers, who use the product for animal feed, time to adapt and source their supply in Brazil or Argentina, for instance.
Over 80 percent of American soybean exports to the EU come from Louisiana, the home state of Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson — something senior EU officials have been eager to emphasize.
As for minimizing the pain: Lobbying by the French, Italian and Irish governments secured the removal of Kentucky bourbon from a retaliatory list dating back to Trump’s first term. The Commission would rather everyone be on board than expose national leaders to Trump’s threat to hit European booze exports with 200 percent tariffs.
Raison d’être
While Trump wants to take a wrecking ball to the multilateral trading system that Washington nurtured after World War II, the European Union isn’t ready to give it up so easily. After all, the single market is arguably the bloc’s greatest achievement, and rules-based trade is part of its DNA.
That means playing by the established rules, with the World Trade Organization acting as an umpire, even if Washington has paralyzed its operation by blocking judicial appointments to the WTO’s highest appeals court.
“Any offer we make to the U.S. needs to be consistent with WTO rules. At this moment in time, we cannot afford to appear that we also have decided to ignore the rules,” said Ignacio García Bercero, who was the U.S. point person at the Commission’s trade department during Trump’s first term.
So far, EU capitals welcome the Commission’s approach. Even if bourbon, thanks to French
exceptionnalisme, got special treatment, capitals still feel that the pain has been shared equally. This week’s trade countermeasures were backed by 26 member countries with only Hungary, a perennial outsider, dissenting.
“Member states are almost relieved they don't have to deal with this themselves,” a third EU diplomat said.
“But the speed at which we should react is slightly more controversial.”
Koen Verhelst and Jakob Weizman contributed reporting. 
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