President Trump is no fan of the European Union. He has repeatedly claimed that the bloc was created to “screw” America, has pledged to slap big tariffs on its cars, and this week enacted global steel and aluminum levies that are expected to hit some $28 billion in exports from the bloc.
But for months, E.U. officials hoped that they could bring the American president around, avoiding a painful trade war. They tried placating the administration with easy wins — like ramped-up European purchasing of U.S. natural gas — while pushing to make a deal.
It is now becoming clear that things won’t be that simple.
When American tariffs on steel, aluminum, and products that use those metals kicked in on Wednesday, Europe reacted by announcing a sweeping package of retaliatory tariffs of its own. The first wave will take effect on April 1, imposing tariffs as high as 50 percent on products including Harley Davidson motorcycles and Kentucky bourbon. A second wave will come in mid-April, targeting farm products and industrial goods that are important to Republican districts.
European officials have been clear that they were not eager to take that aggressive step: They wanted to negotiate, and they still do.
“But you need both hands to clap,” Maros Sefcovic, the European Commission’s trade minister, said on Wednesday. “The disruption caused by tariffs is avoidable if the U.S. administration accepts our extended hand and works with us to strike a deal.”
Europe is facing a difficult reality. It is not clear to many European officials what exactly Mr. Trump wants. Tariffs are sometimes explained by administration officials as an effort to level the playing field, but they are also cited as a tool for raising money for U. S. coffers to pay for tax cuts, or floated as a way to punish the E.U. for its regulation of technology companies.
Mr. Trump has said that Europe has “not been fair” with its trading practices. On average, Europe’s tariffs are just slightly higher than U.S. tariffs — about 3.95 percent on average, compared to America’s 3.5 percent on European goods, based on an ING analysis. But it is the case that certain products face notably higher tariffs when shipped to Europe — cars, for instance, are tariffed at 10 percent.
Mr. Trump has also taken issue with the way Europe and other nations tax producers, and has suggested that future U.S. tariffs will also respond to those policies. In part because of that, some of the tariff rates he has floated — like 25 percent on cars — would be far above the ones he criticizes in Europe.
“We’re going to take back our wealth, and we’re going to take back a lot of the companies that left,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday. U.S. tariffs would echo foreign approaches, he said, though there would be “some cases where they’re a little bit beyond reciprocal.”
Nor has the Trump administration appeared eager to wheel and deal. Mr. Sefcovic went to Washington in February, but he has acknowledged that he made little progress on that trip. President Trump has not spoken individually with Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, since taking office.
Without a clear understanding of what is driving Mr. Trump, and without trusted intermediaries within the administration, it is hard to figure out how to strike a deal that will prevent pain for consumers and companies.
“It doesn’t feel very transactional, it feels almost imperial,” said Penny Naas, a trade expert at the German Marshall Fund. “It’s not a give and take — it’s a ‘you give.’”
That is why the E.U. is now underscoring that it can hit back if forced, and that there will be more to come if the Trump administration goes ahead with the additional tariffs that it has threatened. The bloc is aiming to keep its measures proportionate to what the U.S. is doing, in a bid to avoid escalating the conflict.
But it has also been preparing for months for the possibility of an all-out trade war, even if it hoped to avoid one.
“If they move ahead with those, we will respond swiftly and forcefully, as we have today,” Olof Gill, a European Commission spokesman, said during a news conference on Wednesday. “We have been preparing assiduously for all of these outcomes. We showed today that we can respond swiftly, firmly and proportionately.”
The question is what might come next.
Mr. Trump has promised additional tariffs on European goods, including so-called reciprocal tariffs that could come as soon as April 2. He’s also talked about significantly ramping up tariffs for specific products, like cars.
“It’ll be 25 percent, generally speaking, and that will be on cars and all other things,” Mr. Trump said in late-February comments in the Oval Office. “The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it, and they’ve done a good job of it, but now I’m president.”
European officials have been clear that if things get bad enough, they could use a new anti-coercion tool that would allow them to put tariffs or market limitations on service companies. That could mean technology firms, like Google.
While Europe sells the United States more physical goods than it buys from it, it runs a big deficit with the U.S. when it comes to technology and other services — in large part because Europeans are a big market for social media and other internet-based companies.
Mr. Sefcovic has listed the anti-coercion tool as a hypothetical option to “protect” the European market from external meddling, and other European leaders have been more vocal about the possibility of using it on the United States specifically.
But since Europe does not want to worsen the trade war, hitting American technology firms is seen as a tool for more extreme circumstances.
“It’s more the nuclear option,” said Carsten Brzeski, a global economist for ING Research.
For now, European officials are hoping that the threat of retaliatory tariffs will suffice to drag America toward the negotiating table. The measures are expected to hit products that are important in Republican strongholds: Bourbon from Kentucky, soybeans from Louisiana.
As workers and companies stare down bleak forecasts, the theory goes, they will call their political contacts and pressure them to negotiate.
The spirits industry — poised to be hit hard by 50 percent tariffs on whiskey — has already voiced alarm. The industry was seriously affected by an earlier and less extreme version of the retaliatory tariffs during Mr. Trump’s first administration.
“Reimposing these debilitating tariffs at a time when the spirits industry continues to face a slowdown” will “further curtail growth and negatively impact distillers and farmers in states across the country,” Chris Swonger, the chief executive of the Distilled Spirits Council, said in a statement on Wednesday.
Political turbulence is already causing pain for some American companies. Tesla’s sales in Germany plunged in February and have slumped across Europe, highlighting anger at Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive and a close ally of Mr. Trump.
But the administration has indicated a willingness to accept some economic pain in exchange for its long-term trade goals — which involve nothing short of rewriting the rules of global trade.
“There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big,” Mr. Trump said in an interview on Fox News on Sunday.
To Europe, a world where Mr. Trump is bent on reorganizing the global order is a more treacherous one. The unfolding conflict risks permanently undermining its most important trading relationship, one that it has long viewed as mutually beneficial, while damaging its close alliance with the United States.
“There are no two economies in the world as integrated as the United States and Europe,” Ms. Naas said. “Decoupling is not really an option, at the moment, so now we’re going to be stuck in this tariff paradigm.”
Ana Swanson contributed reporting.