Trump usually backs down, but this time it’s European countries that are chickening out

Hello and welcome to This is Europe.

Donald Trump’s apparent U-turn on supplying critical weapons to Ukraine seems like a partial rapprochement with the US’s European allies in Nato. His bromance with Vladimir Putin has cooled, so maybe all that “daddy” talk at the Nato summit in the Hague has actually paid off. Trump now agrees that “having a strong Europe is a very good thing”.

The US president also gave an interview to the BBC this week in which he spoke warmly about Nato and collective defence. That will have come as a relief in European capitals, too. After all, it’s not long since Trump was casting doubt on whether the US would come to Europe’s military rescue (as the Nato treaty requires) and was pausing arms shipments to Kyiv.

But if Trump is giving to Europe with one hand (and nobody should mistake him for a reliable ally, Rafael Behr wrote), he is taking away with the other.

EU leaders were stunned by the announcement on Saturday of tariffs of 30% on almost all EU exports of goods to the US from 1 August. As EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič pointed out, tariffs this punitive would make normal transatlantic trade “almost impossible”.

The new threat blindsided officials as it “blew up” months of painstaking progress in talks on an EU/US “framework” free trade deal, Lisa O’Carroll, who covers trade for the Guardian, said. On Wednesday, Trump also threatened to impose tariffs on pharmaceutical imports.

Yet, EU “countermeasures” that were meant to come into effect on Monday at midnight were put on pause. “Most European governments did not want to pull the trigger,” Lisa said. In the spring it was Trump who blinked, halving a 20% tariff threat to 10%, pending negotiations. It earned him the Taco label (Trump Always Chickens Out). Now, regardless of how infuriated they are, it is European countries that are chickening out, wrote Guardian Europe columnist Nathalie Tocci.

The stakes for Europe’s economy and jobs are high, so risking a full-on trade war with the US is a difficult proposition. Washington is already applying tariffs on €380bn of goods imported from the EU annually. And thousands of European-made vehicles meant for the US market are sitting idle at EU ports, a result of 25% tariffs imposed on the sector by Trump in April.

But even if Brussels wants to hit back tactically, the EU’s internal political divisions are undermining it. France prefers a hawkish response: Emmanuel Macron suggested that the “nuclear” option (an anti-coercion instrument that has never been deployed) should be aimed at US tech and services exports. Under pressure from Volkswagen and other big German car makers, Friedrich Merz is desperate to find a negotiated settlement. Rightwing governments, such as Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, are keener to protect their bilateral exports to the US than to stick up for Europe as a whole. The Baltic states do not want to antagonise Trump because they fear Russian military aggression and because Trump’s attitude to Nato seems to equivocate.

But this chickening out, while economically understandable, could backfire politically, Nathalie argued. Succumbing to Trump’s bullying could lead to to capitulation on such US demands as unravelling the EU’s digital regulations.

When the UK and US made a “framework” trade deal recently, in EU circles it was dismissed it as a poor outcome. Now, despite the EU’s combined clout in negotiations, it would be very grateful for a similar ‘bare bones’ accord, said Lisa.

And if an EU deal turns out to be even worse than the UK’s, will Viktor Orbán and other Kremlin-admiring Eurosceptics have more reason to argue that European unity pays no dividends?

In the meantime, the Russian menace and Trump’s on-again, off-again antics are pushing some European governments to think more actively about defending each other. Away from all the talk of small boats during Macron’s state visit to the UK last week, the two countries – Europe’s only nuclear powers – quietly agreed a significant nuance to their nuclear weapons policies, which for the first time will allow them to coordinate. Let’s hope they never need to activate it.

Stay updated with our Europe live blog, and see you next week.

Editor’s picks

Opinion and analysis

Life, arts and culture

In pictures