Hours after negotiators finalized their conditions for a contentious EU-US trade deal agreed to last summer, top European Parliament negotiator Bernd Lange has defended the pace and the scope of the agreement – but warned that Europe will never be out of the woods while US President Donald Trump is in office.
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“We had to be careful really,” he told Euronews’ Europe Today programs Wednesday morning. “President Trump really used coercive measures against us. So now we have a safety net.”
Diplomats and MEPs reached an agreement late on Tuesday to implement the contentious EU-US agreement, which eliminates duties on most US industrial goods imported into Europe.
The negotiations concluded two weeks after US President Donald Trump threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on EU cars if Europeans did not implement the agreement – clinched by Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Turnberry, Scotland, last summer – by July 4th.
The European Parliament had been pushing for stronger safeguards to shield the deal in the event of further unilateral threats from Trump. A so-called “sunset clause”, which would allow the EU to terminate the deal unless renewed, was included for 31 December 2029, 11 months after Trump is scheduled to leave office.
Confronting the unknown
The so-called “Turnberry Agreement” has been criticized by many MEPs as lopsided, as it sets US tariffs on EU goods at 15 percent while slashing duties on US goods imported into Europe.
“This is a package which gives predictability and safety for us, for our consumer and our industry. Therefore, I’m quite happy that we concluded it,” Lange said.
He did however couch these comments in concern that the EU has “no security” when it comes to the mercurial moods of the Republican president or “turbulences on the other side of the Atlantic”.
“We really have a safety net and yes, we have safeguards. We will have a monitoring of the economic consequences inside the European Union, starting three months after this legislation is coming into force,” he said.
“We have a lot of suspension clauses and we also have clear regulation that if the United States will not decrease the tariffs for these metal products until the end of the year, then we will raise our tariffs for this project.”
He said the package gives Europe predictability for “the unknown” and hopes “the US administration will act properly”.