EU resists linking US tariffs waiver to revival of free trade agreement
brussels — The European Union distanced itself from the idea of reviving talks on a broad free-trade agreement with the US as part of EU efforts to gain a permanent exemption from US President Donald Trump’s controversial import tariffs on steel and aluminium.
A day after US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the Trump administration is willing to restart negotiations on the stalled TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, the European Commission said it’s seeking a “dialogue” with Washington “on issues of common interest” including global steel overcapacity.
“More contacts will be held in the coming weeks to agree the exact scope and framework of this EU-US dialogue,” a spokesman for the commission, the 28-nation EU’s executive arm in Brussels, said on Friday. “The commission is committed to engage in this process in an open and constructive way. However, it should be clear that this dialogue does not represent the revival of the process for a comprehensive Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.”
The TTIP negotiations to expand the world biggest economic relationship have been frozen since Trump entered the White House with an “America First” agenda that has shunned multilateral
He [Trump] terminated the trans-Pacific deal; he didn’t terminate TTIP Wilbur Ross, US Commerce Secretary
trade initiatives. This extended to the completed TransPacific Partnership, from which Trump withdrew.
“He terminated the trans-Pacific deal; he didn’t terminate TTIP,” Ross said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Thursday. “That was meant quite deliberately and quite overtly as a message that we’re open to discussions with the European Commission.”
European trade chief Cecilia Malmstrom and Ross spoke four days ago with their eyes on a May 1 deadline for Trump to decide whether to prolong an exclusion for the EU from US import tariffs of 25 per cent on steel and 10 per cent on aluminium.
The White House justified the levies introduced a week ago on national-security grounds dismissed by the EU, which has demanded a permanent exemption and threatened to join China in applying tit-for-tat tariffs on American goods and complaining to the World Trade Organisation. — Bloomberg