The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said in a statement that it would move forward with “swift and proportionate” measures.
The EU announcement came hours after the US administration imposed 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports in a massive escalation of the trade war between two longstanding allies.
For Europe, the new tariffs would be nearly four times the size of similar duties imposed during Trump’s first term, when the US targeted nearly $7 billion of the bloc’s metals exports, citing national security concerns.
In addition, Trump has announced reciprocal tariffs coming in early April based on policies of partners that are seen as obstacles to US trade, including Europe’s value-added tax, and has targeted certain goods including European cars.
The EU’s trade chief, Maros Sefcovic, traveled to Washington last month to try to find an amicable solution with senior members of the Trump team including US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. He offered lowering tariffs on industrial goods, including cars, one of Trump’s longstanding demands, and increasing US imports of liquefied natural gas and defense goods.
“The US administration doesn’t seem to be engaging to make a deal,” Sefcovic said on Monday. “As the US is watching over their interests, so is the EU,” he said, adding that the bloc “will always protect European businesses, workers and consumers from unjustified tariffs because we know they expect no less from us.”
Brussels said earlier that it would retaliate on any US move swiftly and proportionately and has been working for months on various lists of goods to hit, including politically sensitive products from certain US constituencies that would inflict more economic pain on the US side than the European economy.
In the European steel market, producers are bracing for a two-fold impact, with European exports to the US set to fall, and the region’s imports set to rise as metal is re-routed away from the US.
“We can indeed expect the EU market – already saturated with cheap steel imports from Asia, North Africa and the Middle East — to be further flooded as steel intended for the US market is redirected because of the new tariffs,” a spokesperson for industry lobby group Eurofer said.
During the first Trump presidency, for every three tonnes of steel deflected from the US market because of tariffs, two tonnes went to the EU, the spokesperson said.
Aluminum producers are also bracing for a surge in imports, particularly from Canada, which typically supplies more than half of the aluminum that the US imports. On Tuesday, Trump announced that he’d double the levy on Canadian steel and aluminum imports to 50%.
For the EU, the fight over American metals tariffs started in 2018 during Trump’s first term, when the US hit steel and aluminum exports with duties, citing national security concerns. At the time, officials in Brussels scoffed at the notion that the EU posed such a threat.
The 27-nation bloc retaliated by targeting politically sensitive companies with retaliatory duties, including Harley-Davidson Inc. motorcycles and Levi Strauss & Co. jeans.
The two sides agreed to a temporary truce in 2021, when the US partly removed its measures and introduced a set of tariff-rate quotas above which duties on the metals are applied, while the EU froze all of its restrictive measures.
At the end of March, suspended EU tariffs on about $3 billion of US products are set to snap back into place. Procedurally, the EU could quickly unfreeze those duties.