Failed EU-US TRQ Negotiations, Trump Victory on Minds of Europeans
Although the EU ambassador emphasized all the ways that the EU and the U.S. coordinate on trade, a panelist discussing the future of the U.S.-EU trade relationship demonstrated the ways the two economic powers talk past each other at times.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
Former assistant U.S. trade representative Dan Mullaney, who worked on negotiating the Global Arrangement on Steel and Aluminum before his retirement, told the audience at the Washington International Trade Association event that the EU and the U.S. "had this great objective," and had hoped that once they set up a framework to erect barriers to non-market metals and metals produced with higher carbon intensity, other partners would join. "Well, we didn't get there, and why?"
Mullaney asked was it a lack of compliance with World Trade Organization rules? A reluctance from the EU to gang up on China? Labor concerns?
"If we can't get to a solution, because there are these other issues out there," he said, he hopes the two sides could "cabin off" the disagreements to move wholeheartedly toward their common challenges.
When asked by International Trade Today if he neglected to represent a major EU objection -- that the tariff rate quotas on European steel are not congruent with the goal of advantaging clean steel and punishing non-market steel -- he said, "We can't get [to agreement] if one of the objectives on the table is to achieve this incentivization of sustainable market economy, trade, and the other objective is: we need to blow up the [Section] 232 tariffs, because we don't like them, because they imply [the EU is a] U.S. national security threat ... . I think we need to figure out how to get past that, that divergence ... and unite on the objective ... a trans-Atlantic green marketplace."
After the session, Mullaney did soften a bit, and said the tariff-rate quota regime on EU steel was not something he saw as "the final end result." He said if the EU and the U.S. could write "a fulsome, creative agreement" that would make sure that the EU prices are not a result of "knock-on effects of excess capacity in China or other places," the volumes allowed in tariff-free from Europe would not have to be tied to pre-Section 232 volumes.
At a later event at Harvard, called, "European Economies Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place," former EU commissioner for trade Cecilia Malmstrom noted that President Joe Biden didn't lift the Section 232 tariffs on European metals, he imposed quotas -- "and they hurt European companies a lot."
At the WITA event, EU Ambassador Jovita Neliupšienė said that if the U.S. imposes new tariffs on the EU, "We can really defend our interests in one way or another, counterbalancing the measures."
Malmstrom agreed, saying the EU is preparing retaliation in case Donald Trump is elected next week, "as we did last time."
But she also said the EU would have to find ways to work with a Trump administration, as well. Neliupšienė said EU officials are emphasizing to leaders in Congress that if Europe and the U.S. want to advance their technology and protect their national security, and set the standards for new tech, they need to work together. She said that the EU is much closer to the U.S. now in its views of the market distortions caused by Chinese industrial subsidies, and the exports that result from that production.