EU calls Trump trade tactics short-sighted, focused on election

The European Union’s new trade commissioner criticized U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff pressure as a short-sighted strategy that’s motivated by a desire to get re-elected and is forcing the bloc to rethink the tools it has to respond.

“It’s short-term thinking,” Phil Hogan said in a video interview with Global Counsel Chairman Peter Mandelson, a former EU Trade Commissioner, at a conference in London on Thursday. “Between now and the November elections is what Mr. Trump is thinking about.”

Hogan spoke from Washington during his first trip there as the EU trade chief, a role he assumed in December. He was expected to meet with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer later on Thursday as the two sides try to solve disputes involving tariffs ranging from France’s digital tax to a long-running Airbus SE-Boeing Co. dispute.

Hogan’s trip overlapped with a White House ceremony on Wednesday where the U.S. and China signed phase one of a trade deal that came together partly through tit-for-tat import taxes that restrained both of the world’s largest economies last year.

“The U.S. president has certainly decided that tariffs are a way of concentrating the mind and getting people to the table,” Hogan told the London audience. “He is obsessed with trying to reduce the deficit” and “has gone against the natural instinct of what policy makers have been doing.”

‘Let’s Talk’

In separate remarks at an event in the U.S. capital, Hogan said the two trading partners should stop “beating each other up” and said he was carrying a very simple message to the Trump administration.

“Let’s talk, let’s cooperate, let’s lead,” he said. “The time has come to start discussions in earnest.”

He implicitly questioned the Trump administration’s focus on the U.S. deficit with the EU in goods trade, saying services need to be taken into account as well.

“American services exports to the EU amounted to $256 billion in 2018, with a surplus of $60 billion, all of it strongly supporting jobs and wealth right here in the U.S.,” he said. “On top of that, American companies in Europe send back $123 billion to the U.S. every year.”

He also said prolonging the dispute over Boeing and Airbus would only create self-inflicted economic harm.

“Now is the time to show that we can defend the position of both the U.S. and EU aircraft sectors in a market with strong emerging players,” Hogan said. “That is the real challenge. If we continue to beat each other up, then the future risks being lost to new competitors.”