EU Eyes €100 Billion of US Goods With Tariffs If Talks Fail

Jorge Valero and Alberto Nardelli

Tue, May 6, 2025, 12:47 PM 4 min read

Separately, the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm that handles trade matters, is expected to share a paper with the US this week to try to kick-start the negotiations, Bloomberg reported earlier. Proposals from the EU are expected to include lowering trade and non-tariff barriers and boosting investments in the US.

Negotiations between the EU and US, which began in earnest last month, have made scant progress and the expectation is that the bulk of the American tariffs will remain in place. The EU said on Tuesday that Trump’s ongoing trade investigations will boost the amount of the bloc’s goods facing tariffs to €549 billion.

A commission spokesperson declined to comment.

The new EU counter-measure list will come on top of the €21 billion of US goods already targeted by EU levies in response to Trump’s 25% duty on steel and aluminum exports. The EU agreed earlier this month to delay for 90 days the implementation of those measures after the US lowered its so-called reciprocal rate on most EU exports to 10% from 20% while the negotiations are taking place.

Trump has also imposed a 25% duty on cars as well as some car parts and has initiated investigations that could result in duties on the imports of lumber, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, critical minerals and trucks.

“These import taxes are unjustified and cause economic harm on both sides of the Atlantic,” the EU’s trade chief, Maros Sefcovic, told lawmakers in Strasbourg, France, Tuesday. “This situation is not acceptable and we cannot afford to stay idle.”

The commission has said all options are on the table in response to Trump’s levies and future measures could target services and restrict the export of certain goods, Bloomberg previously reported.

The commission has offered to eliminate all tariffs on industrial goods, including cars, in an effort to address one of Trump’s central complaints — that the EU has unfair barriers to trade. The US rejected that proposal.

In addition, the EU has also offered to buy more US goods including liquefied natural gas or soybeans, one option that helped to diffuse tensions between the two longstanding allies during Trump’s first term.

The US has instead focused on issues such as the bloc’s rules policing technology companies, digital levies as well as the EU’s value-added tax. The commission has refused so far to negotiate about its tech rules and says that its VAT is a fair, non-discriminatory tax that applies equally to domestic and imported goods.

The US currently has tariffs on €380 billion of EU exports, around 70% of its total exports to the American market, at rates between 10% and 25%. The bloc has said it won’t seek a retaliate with tit-for-tat tariffs and instead will try inflict the maximum pain while minimizing the impact on the European supply chain.

When the EU prepared its first list of goods to respond to Trump’s metals tariffs, it targeted politically sensitive constituencies in the US and included goods such as soybeans from Louisiana, home to House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Separately, Airbus SE Chief Executive Officer Guillaume Faury advocated that the EU impose tariffs on Boeing Co. if negotiations fail to remove duties hurting the aerospace industry. The US manufacturer is a major exporter to Europe, and would stand to feel the bulk of any tariffs imposed on American-made planes.

“Europe is in negotiations, and if these negotiations do not lead to a positive outcome, I imagine that — and this is what we hope for — reciprocal tariffs on aircrafts will be imposed,” he told reporters at an event in Paris.

In 2024, the EU exported €531.6 billion in goods to the US and imported €333.4 billion, resulting in a €198.2 billion trade surplus, according to Eurostat. If services are added the picture however is more balanced as the US registers a surplus in this segment. The difference between EU exports to the US and US exports to the EU stood at €48 billion in 2023; the equivalent of just 3% of the total trade between the EU and the US.

“This is the time to act, in unequivocal terms, for the EU’s interest, and toward our goal of maintaining a strong and competitive economy as well as a cohesive society,” Sefcovic said.

--With assistance from Nayla Razzouk.

(Updates with Airbus comment on the final screen.)

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