Good morning,
Of the EU’s most impressive officials, with Brexit and now the Trump trade talks on her CV, few are more able than trade supremo Sabine Weyand to defend the EU’s distinctly one-sided new trade arrangement with Washington.
Weyand did a valiant job in front of the European parliament’s international trade committee on Wednesday (3 September).
During the interminable process of negotiating Brexit and the trade deal that now governs EU-UK trade, ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ was the mantra to come out of UK premiers Theresa May and then Boris Johnson.
Judging by its approach to talks with the US president, the EU Commission does not agree.
To Weyand, the deal with Trump was simply about getting the best on offer from a US president who doesn’t mind increasing prices for US consumers if that means punishing exporting countries.
What else could the EU do when, in Weyand’s words, “confronted with a Trump administration that is determined to use tariffs”.
And going down the Trumpian path of a full-blown trade war, with protectionist counter measures, as France and several other EU states urged, would just have made things worse.
“Those who have retaliated – and there are not many – are in a worse position. It is a fact that we got the best deal that anyone got. We think we did the best to defend EU interests,” she said.
The EU commission went for real politik. Successfully, too, says Weyand, who argued that a 15 percent US tariff on most EU exports would be painful but that the early evidence that it will hurt American wallets the most, without causing trans-atlantic trade to dry up.
“No one got a deal that is comparable to ours. Relatively seen, we are better off than others. At some stage you have to stop banging your head against a wall hoping that it will move.”
So what does this mean for the EU’s trade agenda and for global free trade in general?
“The old order is gone, and it will not come back,” Weyand told MEPs, though she was quick to say that this would not mean a “revert to a Hobbesian world of ‘might is right’”.
The Commission says that it has used the Trump tariff wars to diversify the EU’s trade relations. New deals with the South American Mercosur bloc are ready for ratification. Others with India, the UAE and Indonesia are in the pipeline.
But accepting that a bad deal is better than no deal is hardly a good recipe for trade – or another other policy.
– Benjamin Fox, Africa editor
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