Trump's tariff threat is risking a trade war with European years in production

The European Union has withdrawn against President Donald Trump's latest proposal that it will impose an import tariff of 50% for all EU goods and warns that transatlantic trade must build on “respect, not threats”.

The accusation was, after Trump said in a Friday post on his social platform of truth, that trade negotiations with Brussels would go “nowhere” and suggested that he would beat a cover service of 50% for all European goods from June 1st.

It was only the latest Bellicose remark from Trump and came in the middle of a broader column of relationships between the two global powers, which were recorded for months of distrust and economic sparring.

The EU, in which almost 450 million people live, is the world's largest trading block and one of the best commercial partners in Washington. Last year goods were exported in the United States in the United States, while goods worth around 370 billion US dollars were imported.

Trump's most recent broad side will follow his announcement of a 39% tariff for European goods on April 2.

Stephen Moore, a former economic advisor from Trump, told the BBC that his former boss had expressed his frustration with the EU.

“I think he had hoped that we would now have the EU on the table with a kind of deal and has not come so far,” he said, giving the 50% goal a “shot on the bow”.

The EU trading commissioner Maroš Šefčovič said late Friday that “EU-US-trade is unsurpassed and must be guided by mutual respect and not by threats”, and that the block is still obliged to secure a deal for both after a call with the US trade representative Jamieson Greer and the Minister of Commerce Lutnick.

While the EU's reaction signals a willingness to negotiate, Discord has deepened between the block and its long -standing transatlantic ally when he returned to the combative attitude that Trump took during his first administration when he flew in view of decades of cooperation and occupied the EU as an economic rival.

In 2018, Trump said: “Nobody treated us much worse than the European Union” and argued that the block was supposed to take advantage of the United States that it repeated this year and described the EU as “formed to fool the United States”.

While the ideological architects of Trump's first administration such as Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro have also recorded the criticism of the union, many have shared these feelings in Trump's current inner circle.

In February, Vice President JD Vance beat at a security conference in Munich in February to questions from freedom of speech to migration and defense, which affected the European perspective of America as a steadfast cultural ally.

“The threat that I am most concerned about Europe,” he said, “is the threat of interior of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values ​​that are shared with the United States.”

That came after Elon Musk-Den richest man in the world, who at the beginning of his second term as Trump's closer advisor, acted behind Germany's right-wing extremist alternative for the German party that Germany asked to leave the EU.

A large part of the hostility of the second Trump government towards Europe was security financing, which mostly in the course of the war in Ukraine.

While the government's view of the war in Ukraine has been awakened since then, Vance repeatedly sent himself against military help to Kyiv and said in February: “I don't care what happens to Ukraine in one way or another.”

And in a signal discussion between high -ranking administrative officials who were leaked in March, the Vice President initially opposed the US strikes in Yemen and argued that he did not want to “equip” Europe, while Defense Minister Pete Hegseth warned that Europe treated America like a “idiot” by defending it to defend it.

While Šefčovič's demand for a “deal that works for both”, reflects the characteristic reaction of the EU to the bumps of the Trump government, Europe has prepared for the possibility of another economic relationship with the United States for months.

At the beginning of this month, Šefčovič said that the block preferred to negotiate “but not to the price” before announcing possible retaliation duties for US goods the following day.

Europe also seems to prepare for a future without America's guarantee for European security against Russia. Germany used a permanent military brigade for the first time since the end of World War II.

A brewing war with the block throws the position of Great Britain in relief, which voted for the abandonment of the EU in 2016, but recently signed a trade agreement with Europe and an economic deal with the USA

London seems to be lifting the steepest tariffs after Trump agreed last month to keep the levy for British goods at 10%, but Great Britain now has to go a sensitive line: maintaining his “special relationship” to Washington and a closer alignment with his biggest trading partner in Brussels.

But with the tensions that rise above the Atlantic, even allies risk being trapped in the crossfire. It is unlikely that the EU – a geopolitical heavyweight for itself – does not grasp the US tariffs that lie down without taking its own movements.