The Impact of Trump’s Tariffs on the EU

News Analysis

While experts are divided on how the European Union (EU) and its 27 members should handle the prospect of tariffs being imposed by President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration, there is agreement that the continent will have to make adjustments politically and economically to avoid being left worse off.

Robert Tyler, a senior policy adviser at Brussels-based thinktank New Direction, believes there are ways for the European nations to stay on the new president’s good side, but they will require flexibility that has largely eluded them in recent years.

Tyler told The Epoch Times that the first major change for the European Union in terms of relations with the United States would be a political rather than economic shift.

“Trump is more interested in working with individual EU member states rather than the EU itself. We saw that during the last administration,” Tyler said. “We saw that with the development of things like the Three Seas Initiative, there was a greater emphasis on this idea of working outside of EU structures and doing trade deals in the areas that EU doesn’t have competency, in particular, on energy imports, for example, the liquefied natural gas.”

The Three Seas Initiative is a forum of thirteen EU member states located between the Baltic Sea in the north, the Adriatic in the west, and the Black Sea in the east in Central and Eastern Europe, which aims to create a regional dialogue on questions affecting these countries and has been strongly supported by then-President Trump, who spoke at the organization’s annual summit in Poland in 2017.