Trump Threatens Undefined Tariffs for EU Products
President-elect Donald Trump, in a social media posting Dec. 20, wrote: "I told the European Union that they must make up their tremendous deficit with the United States by the large scale purchase of our oil and gas. Otherwise, it is TARIFFS all the way!!!"
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Two European think tank scholars had just published a day earlier a brief about how the EU needs to prepare for Trumpian tariffs, noting that about 20% of EU goods exports go to the U.S. They said that the EU should buy more defense goods from U.S. manufacturers, and, as it did before, leverage LNG purchases to mollify Trump.
They said that the U.S. sold 48% of the EU's LNG imports, but still, 16% of those imports were from Russia. "Commission President [Ursula] von der Leyen has already floated the idea of replacing a portion of Russian imports with US LNG following Trump’s re-election," the Jaques Delors Centre/Institute paper said.