Given the continued and escalating threats
Oh darn, Trump fucked around and found out.
The European Union’s legislative body on Wednesday halted work on the formal approval and implementation of the trade deal it reached last summer with President Donald Trump.
“Given the continued and escalating threats, including tariff threats, against Greenland and Denmark, and their European allies, we have been left with no alternative but to suspend work” on the deal, said Bernd Lange, the chairman of the European Parliament’s international trade committee.
Wait that’s not supposed to happen. Everybody is supposed to say “we bow before your superior wisdom Sir” – not “ok then no trade deal for you, Donny from Queens.”
On Thursday, leaders of the 27 E.U. countries will meet to discuss their coordinated response to Trump’s Greenland threats.
This may include a package of retaliatory tariffs worth nearly $110 billion, which would impact a wide range of U.S. exports, from Boeing airplanes to soybeans to Kentucky bourbon.
Another potential retaliatory measure would be to deploy the bloc’s “Anti-Coercion Instrument,” a policy option sometimes referred to as the E.U.’s trade “bazooka.”
The ACI would allow the European Commission to target nearly any U.S. goods or services in Europe with a wide range of restrictions and barriers.
Go for it. Turn the heat up. Burn him.
This is one of the things I’ve been waiting for. The way to deal with a bully is to gang up on him, and operate from a position of strength. Every member nation of NATO should pass a law stating that any and all new tariffs against any of them by the US will be addressed by a universal tariff on all goods from the US. Make it clear there’s going to be an automatic and painful response–and be ready to follow through.